LinkedIn Marketing Guide for Community Banks & Credit Unions

Most financial marketers understand the need to maintain an active social media presence for their financial institutions. However, LinkedIn tends to get overlooked compared to social titans like Facebook and Instagram. If you think LinkedIn is only used for recruiting purposes, you’re missing a major prospecting opportunity.

LinkedIn is unique in that it is comprised entirely of professionals and company accounts. These users are always interested to learn about their industries and find solutions to the challenges they face. For banks and credit unions, LinkedIn has a wealth of potential customers, particularly when it comes to promoting commercial deposit accounts, financing options and business services. By optimizing your presence on LinkedIn and providing informative material that will be valuable to a commercial audience, you can engage with these professionals to generate interest in your brand, promote your content, and build a new source of leads. Read on to discover best practices for engaging with a professional audience on LinkedIn.

Optimize your Profile

The best place to start with optimizing your presence on LinkedIn is your profile. Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your company’s profile:

• Profile Cover Photo: This is the largest visual on your page, so you should use this as an opportunity to reflect your brand or local market. You may wish to create a photo montage of happy customers, your team of associates or community events that you’ve hosted or sponsored. Be sure to use the correct image size: 1536 x 768.

• Logo: Your logo is arguably the most important image on your LinkedIn account. Other users will see your logo whenever you post content, send a message, or comment on an update. Maintain a consistent logo across social media platforms in order to establish your brand footprint online. Once you’ve added your logo, take the time to evaluate it. Does your logo stand out from the rest of your page? If not, try adding white space in the background. Finally, make sure you size the image correctly as well: 300 x 300.

• Tagline: Also known as a slogan, a tagline should communicate your bank’s mission and services in a short, memorable phrase. In your LinkedIn profile, you can add your bank’s tagline or slogan beneath your cover photo. This gives visitors a succinct first impression of what you do. For example, do you specialize in business banking? Offer a first-time homebuyer program, or a service created especially for the local communities you serve? Whatever makes your bank unique, highlight it in the tagline.

• Overview: On the “About” tab of your page, write a full description of your bank’s history, current strengths, community involvement, and what you offer to both potential customers and employees.

• Website Link: Make sure to link back to your bank website. As with any link pointing back to your website, be sure to use the full https://www version of your URL whenever possible.

• Jobs: Posting current job openings will drive more traffic to your page. It’s also an opportunity to reinforce your image as a local bank that employs people in the community. If you recruit new employees often, you might consider paying for a LinkedIn Career Page (a premium feature from LinkedIn Talent Solutions).

• Branch Locations: Add your bank branches to the “Locations” section of your profile. Visitors will be able to click off-site for directions to each location.

Create Showcase pages

Your Company Page is the main site for your bank on LinkedIn. Here, you engage with multiple audience segments, from employees to existing customers and prospects. A LinkedIn Showcase Page enables you to target and engage with a niche audience. This can be especially useful for banks that have specific industry solutions or separate divisions like this Showcase of Citi Private Bank.

Connect with your Employees

Connecting with existing employees is a best practice for LinkedIn. Most importantly, it increases exposure for your bank among your employees’ connections. How many of your employees currently have LinkedIn accounts and are connected to your bank? You can encourage employees to join the site and connect with your business page by holding workshops on profile optimization and/or offering free professional headshots for employees to use on LinkedIn. Make LinkedIn engagement part of your company culture and reward employees who are active on the site. As a best practice make sure to define acceptable/unacceptable representation of your brand and consider providing employees a repository of content they can share (especially lenders).

Connect with Existing Customers

Encourage your customers to follow your company page for updates, news, and useful insights. To help your customers find your page, add a LinkedIn icon to your website header/footer, employee email signatures, and corporate email communications. To accelerate page followers from existing customers, consider using LinkedIn Ads to reach existing customers by using Matched Audience targeting.

Leverage LinkedIn Groups

Is your bank facilitating any Groups or encouraging lenders to join relevant conversations? If not, you’re missing an opportunity to build awareness, engagement, and leads from extremely specific audiences. To find relevant groups, use the regular search bar to look for business and professional groups from your region and surrounding metro areas, local chambers of commerce, banking/finance groups, and anything else related to your bank’s specialties. LinkedIn identifies search results as group, company, or individual, so searching is easy. After reviewing the group’s page to ensure a good fit, simply click on the blue “Request to join” button near the top of the page.