Social Media: the New Face of Financial Lead Gen?

As the financial services market reels from a huge indiscriminate reputation hit, they are still pumping out brand advertising. Those media dollars are going to waste. Building awareness for your financial service - bank, investment, insurance - when all that people are aware of is doom, gloom and questionable civic morality (e.g. golden parachutes, bailouts for the top tier, etc..).

Turns out that traditional search marketing lead generation also tilts away from the reasonable to favor...social media. Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins over at Mashable covered the purchase of the blog Bankaholic, essentially a one man shop, for $15M by Bankrate.  The value to bankrate? A way to connect with potential customers beyond traditional advertising or search marketing. I posted about an alternative approach for retail banks to start digging their reputations out of the colossal crater. This is a similar approach. Bankaholic is doing well but not a huge reach play (Alexa ranking of 42,168 average less than 20 comments per post). Mark has a strong POV from his own experience:

"Several years ago, I served as chief technology officer for a financial services and credit restoration company, and assisted in setting up our systems to work with our AdSense buys at the time. At the time, bankruptcy laws were in extreme states of flux and people were looking to get in quick on matters relating to their credit ratings before the legal changes went into effect, and AdSense keyword buys were sometimes north of $48.00 a click.

It was around that time where it became far more efficient to look to social media as a means for promotion than CPC advertising for lead generation, and I suspect that’s what’s going on here."

Effectiveness of Social Media

As we push our models for mapping and confirming the effectiveness of social media to reach hadcore communications and marketing goals (like lead gen), the marketplace confirms same with a nice-size purchase price for an engaging financial blog.

Comments

[ADMAVEN - The Interactive Advertising Blog]

Interesting angle in this article - the blog purchase is particularly bold.

[John Philip Green]

Cool. I wonder what his pageview/uniques/retention numbers looked like. Alexa never tells the whole story.

The startup I like in this space is Smart Hippo. Its a social media community for financial products. I suspect its got less than half the traffic of Bankaholic so far though.

[villa te huur]

This blog is really great and has provided interesting and useful information.Thanks