A Comprehensive Guide to Improving Your Bank’s Digital Presence

NOTE: This article was originally published in the Community Bankers Association of Illinois’ monthly magazine, BankNotes, in May 2019.

After working with 35+ community banks in Missouri and Illinois, we commonly see banks that are losing online traffic because of an incomplete digital presence. Yet, most banks are also striving to appeal to the 18-30 age demographic, who are almost exclusively searching for products and services online.

And it’s not just Gen Z: the 30-60 age demographic spends over half of their time online on a mobile device, and this number is increasing. Digital presence is not just about your website and Facebook page.

 The Problem

Have you looked at your website on your mobile phone lately? Is it mobile responsive? Have you Google searched your bank? You may have inaccurate information or even bad reviews that have not been responded to.

Having a complete digital presence helps you appeal to younger customers, be found and reachable on every customers’ platform of choice, and helps boost your brand when people are searching online for banking products and services.

It’s tedious and time-consuming to set up your digital presence – and banks in general are busy places. But the real issue has nothing to do with time; it’s that this digital knowledge largely doesn’t exist in most banks.

Why It Matters

One of our clients, a $150M midwest bank, had a three-year-old website and growing Facebook following.

But we realized their site was not mobile responsive, which prevented some users from reaching online banking from their smartphones. Additionally, one of their branches had an incorrect address on an unclaimed Google listing. They also had a bad review on Yelp that hadn’t been noticed or responded to.

We cleaned up the bank’s digital listings, got them in touch with the customer behind the negative review, and set up an alert tool to notify them whenever a new review is posted anywhere on the web. Within the first week, two new loan inquiries came in from Yelp. And since we completed the project, the bank continues to get a higher volume of calls and emails inquiring about products – both from current and new customers.

You can use this guide to review and polish your bank’s digital presence in the same way we did for our client.

The 5 Components of Digital Presence

Website

Pull up your website on your smartphone. Does that slideshow image on your homepage display properly? Can you find and access online banking quickly? Over 50% of your customers are trying to use their phones to bank with you, so make sure it’s smooth.

Key tips: put contact information and a mobile banking login right at the top of your page. Test out a chatbot, like Kasisto or Finn AI, to help customers with simple questions, or those that prefer not to call, to get answers quickly.

Mobile responsiveness is the #1 problem you should fix. If it’s not mobile responsive, pause here and contact your website developer!

Social Media

If your bank is active on Facebook, awesome. But if not, this one is easy to fix - today. I bet you have at least one staff member that’s social-savvy. Congrats, they are your new social media lead!

Key tips: aim for two posts a week to start, building up to one per day as it becomes second nature. Each week, do one promo post, one info post (local or FinEd article), and 1-3 “fun” posts (recipes, dogs, events, etc.). Take 30 mins each month to brainstorm topics and put them on a calendar so they get done (better yet, schedule posts ahead of time). Just keep promos light to avoid tiring your followers.

Master Facebook before attempting other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat - or don’t worry about them at all. They do trend younger, but they’re less effective at banking lead gen than Facebook.

Branch Location Listings

Even if you’ve never looked at it, your bank (and probably every branch) has an auto-created listing on Google MyBusiness (business.google.com). These unclaimed listings are often inaccurate or incomplete, even if you’ve been in the same place for 125 years. It’s one of the primary things Google uses to rank search results, and what customers see when they search for you, so it’s very important to claim, complete, and refresh your listings often.

Key tip: Search for your bank and find the "Own this business?" link in your listing on the right. You'll want a separate listing for each branch location, though they should all be associated under one Google account (Google's got lots of help files on this).

Online Directory Listings

Beyond Google MyBusiness, there are 200+ other listings sites online, like YellowPages.com. They all scrape info from a few main databases, but not frequently. This means that inaccuracies go everywhere and stick around. Keep this info up to date to boost your search rankings and findability.

200+ sites make it impossible to maintain manually - but there are inexpensive tools called reputation monitors that can help. Reputation monitors often handle review alerts too, helping you respond faster and gather more reviews from your customers.

Key tips: Manually claim listings on Apple Maps (mapsconnect.apple.com), Yelp (biz.yelp.com), Bing (bingplaces.com), and YellowPages.com (adsolutions.yp.com). To handle the rest, reputation monitors are inexpensive - figure $150 per month for better, full-service ones, and cheaper if you can take on some maintenance work yourself.

Online Reviews

Google, Facebook, and Yelp are the big three, and every customer has their own preferred platform, so you really need to be gathering and managing reviews on all of them.

Many banks are afraid of getting bad reviews. Well – you’re going to get bad reviews. Everyone does. But by avoiding reviews entirely, you’ll miss out on customers who are looking for banks on these platforms. The solution? Keep an eye on reviews and nurture them. Even the St. Louis Arch and the Grand Canyon have 1-star reviews (seriously, go look them up.)

Bad reviews are opportunities to show off your great customer service in public.

Key tips: actively ask for reviews via email or teller cards. Sign up for alerts on the big three platforms, or utilize reputation monitoring. Respond within 24 hours to EVERY review you get, good or bad. Other customers will see this and you’ll essentially wipe out any bad effects. Take the details offline, but show publicly that you care.

Your Next Steps

Even in smaller towns where people know your bank, in that moment where they’re ready to pick up the phone and call you, or look up your hours or if you offer mortgages, you want to make it frictionless to do so. You can lose attention in a split second online - so any non-mobile slide, unresponded-to bad review, or inaccurate phone number, will cause some percentage of people to not reach out to you.

And couldn’t you use a few more calls?