Month: June 2016

Social media is a vitally important part of developing brand awareness and growing your customer base. But in an extremely fast-moving marketplace, it’s never been so important for businesses to constantly review, update, and improve their strategies, to ensure social media activity is actually contributing to business targets. This is something that Portugal’s ActivoBank knows a lot about. On Facebook, the bank set a target of growing an audience of 100,000 fans – it’s now well on the way to 150,000. But how did the bank start conversations with all of these people? And how has it been converting followers on social media into real banking customers? Luis Magro, Marketing Director for ActivoBank, discusses the process.

World Finance: What is your social media strategy? You know you need one, but how do you make sure it’s linked with your business objectives? How do you review it, update it, improve it? In line with the extremely fast-moving marketplace?

Portugal’s ActivoBank has been leading the digital banking conversation in that country; its marketing director Luis Magro joins me now.

Luis, let’s start with your Facebook target of 100,000 fans. You’ve actually surpassed this really quickly – you’re well on your way to 150,000. Why did you set this target for yourself? What business objective did it align with?

Luis Magro: Social media continues to play a very important role in our digital strategy. More than 50 percent of the Portuguese population is already on Facebook, and probably every one of our potential market is already on Facebook.

We already have more fans on Facebook than we have customers – we have 30 percent more. What we are doing is, we are building our friend base, but at the same time converting them to customers.

We estimate that our market is about 700,000 people, so what’s important is that we continue growing until we reach that 700,000, but that we keep pulling them into our customer base.

World Finance: Tell me about how you actually achieve that, then. How do you start the conversation, get Facebook users to become fans, and then as you say convert them from fans into actual customers?

Luis Magro: It’s not easy! Because we have to make nice posts about our products, about our services, and wait for people to interact with us.

This wasn’t enough. We have very good engagement rates, but we were not converting enough friends into customers. What we decided was to launch a virtual branch.

In this virtual branch, our friends can chat with our commercial team. They can access a lot of information of our products and services, and they can even start the process of opening an account. Facebook for us is a very big source of new customers.

World Finance: What lessons did you learn from your fans, and then your customers? And how did you make sure that those lessons were actually carried through to the team members driving the campaign?

Luis Magro: In Facebook, everything happens very fast. So your social media team is of very big importance. They all have the same knowledge, they all have to learn at the same time, they all have to participate in all the decisions. They all have to know what’s happening right now.

This is not a one-man show. This is a team that decides what is best right now, to answer – for example – a comment on our wall. So if you treat everything as a team, you will be consistent along the way.

World Finance: Tell me more about the content that you’re using to engage potential customers. Because you’re active not just on Facebook, you’re across all the main social media sites. So the content you’re putting on Instagram versus Youtube versus – well, Twitter or Facebook – has got to be quite different.

Luis Magro: Yes it’s different – and we have to adapt to each platform.

I was telling you about our virtual branch on Facebook; but recently we launched a virtual branch on Youtube. Completely different: it’s video-based. We have a lot of menus where you can navigate the content so you can choose what you want to see. You can even choose to open an account – you’ll be redirected to our website to start opening an account.

So it’s a virtual branch also, but done in a very different way. And with the same objective, which is acquire new customers. But the content is completely different.

World Finance: Going from converting fans into customers then – a lot of social media interactions from existing customers tend to be complaints. How does your team turn those complaints into a more positive experience?

Luis Magro: A complaint for us is an opportunity to change something that went wrong in the past.

What we see is that when we are afraid of people complaining, it’s because something about our products and services are not going well. So the problem is not the complaint – the problem is the product or the service.

If you have a good service, you won’t get complaints. And this is where ActivoBank has been very good in the past, because we are growing at a very fast pace, because of all our customers recommending ActivoBank to their family and to their friends. And this only happens if we have this preoccupation of having everybody happy.

World Finance: I said in the introduction that ActivoBank is leading the digital conversation in Portugal – and in fact it’s because of you that the Portuguese central bank doesn’t require physical signatures for opening an account. What do you expect the next digital innovation is going to be in the banking sector?

Luis Magro: Without having innovated yet, it’s a bit early to say what we are going to do! But for example, people opening accounts without even having to go to the branch. For example, we would like to see people from their homes, opening their account with a video conference. We could get facial verification comparing the video with a photo id. And a digital signature at the end, and the account would be open.

There’s a lot of stuff coming to the market – but rules and regulations are heavy, and sometimes it’s very difficult to bring these new ideas to our customers.

World Finance: Luis, thank you.

Luis Magro: Thank you.