Looking to generate more business leads for your Treasury Management services? Many of our clients are looking for ways to add more businesses to their sales pipelines and one of the easiest ways is to use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a business-focused, professional social networking app and many of your prospects are using it. Today, we’ll visit some tips on using LinkedIn posts for the Banker.

Say Something Relevant

First, what do you want to say? Posting something relevant to your prospective business customers is important and coming up with something interesting can be challenging. However, when the idea strikes, we recommend putting the idea through a content filter. A “content filter” guides your posts to be relevant to the people you want to talk to.

For instance, at Malzahn Strategic, our content filter is: Deliver Value, Educate, Inform, Entertain, and Give the Reader a Reason to Take Action.

If you don’t have a content filter set up for your organization, we recommend you speak with your marketing team to develop these guidelines and then share them among those who post to social media.

Once you have your topic and have run it through your content filter, write the post in Word so you can verify spelling and check for grammatical issues. If you are stuck with a sentence and can’t quite make it sound right, using an AI based re-writer might be useful. ChatGPT and Copy.AI are two re-writers we have regularly used when we get “stuck”.

Once written, make sure your post is less than 3,000 characters. This is LinkedIn’s limit on posts.

Some organizations may require employees run their posts through a review process before posting. If you need to do that, get your post approved.

Post Your Post

Once you are ready to post your information, consider adding a photo or infographic to emphasize or confirm your content. You can easily create an infographic in PowerPoint or have your marketing person help you out in formatting a photo for LinkedIn. There are specific sizes for LinkedIn photos/infographics: 1200 x 627 72dpi or 1080 x 1080 72dpi are the two we recommend. Anything else and LinkedIn tends to crop with undesirable results.

If you wish to add a video to your post, we recommend a resolution of 1920 x 1920 (square). You should also have a preview image created to match your video 1920 x 1920 72dpi. If you don’t use a preview image, LinkedIn will pick the most awkward part of your video to use for a preview. We also recommend no fade-ins or fade-outs for your video. Get to the point and don’t waste valuable seconds on a fade.

Now, post your post.

Posting Tips

Here are some things we’ve learned over the years to improve your posts:

• Post should have, but don’t need, an accompanying video, photo, or infographic.
• The first 3 lines are visible on the LinkedIn feed, so make those three lines your point. Get to the point at the top, then elaborate on it later.
• Write concise posts using your organizations’ content filter.
• No Selling in posts – it just annoys prospects. You can do that when you talk to a prospect.
• Work with your marketing or graphic design staff to make your photos, videos, or infographics informative and compelling. Professionalism is important on LinkedIn.
• If your post is important and you want more folks to see it, consider boosting the post for a fee. We’ve seen where $500 spent on a boost can give the post good visibility.
• Looking for free stock photos? Unsplash is a place to start. Your marketing folks might also have a corporate stock photo subscription (Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, etc.) you can take advantage of.
• Pick three hashtags for each post and place them at the bottom of your post. One hashtag is your business primary hashtag and goes on every post, the second one refers to the main topic of your post and the third for the secondary topic of your post (if you have one).
• Posting to relevant LinkedIn groups can be a way to get more views if your post is relevant to the group.

Some Daily and Monthly Maintenance

Here are some tips on maintaining your LinkedIn presence.

• Daily comment on comments. If you get comments on your posts, reply to the comment to keep the conversation going.
• Daily ask others to follow your organization’s LinkedIn page. If your organization doesn’t have a LinkedIn page, push to get one created.
• Daily comment on other posts. Again, use your “content filter” to make sure you are making the right comment.
• Monthly review stats on your posts to see what is working. After a few months, you’ll start to see a pattern of content that works, and content that doesn’t work.

More Resources on Lead Generation

Book: Revenue Growth Engine by Darrell Amy. He has a free audio version available for listening any time.

Book: Outbounding by William “Skip” Miller.

If you made it this far, please follow Malzahn Strategic on Linkedin! We aren’t spammy and post relevant information for the banking industry. Remember our content filter above? We stick to it.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for getting prospects into your Treasury Management pipeline. If your institution is struggling with getting your Treasury Management department up and running or need help with selling Treasury Management services to business customers, we’re here to help.

Looking for ideas to expand your Treasury Management reach to new business customers? Look into the TMClarity Framework, our comprehensive and transformative training and Treasury Management business management system that leads to greater sales success, higher margins, and increased customer retention in a competitive marketplace.

I spoke at a banking association’s workshop for emerging leaders and the event planner asked me a great question, “Where are the emerging leaders in banking?” We discussed the fact that associations work hard to offer quality educational programs for emerging leaders. But attendance is typically lower than they expect. We wondered why this phenomenon is a problem across the nation.

I believe there are several reasons why the emerging leaders don’t participate in these special leadership development programs as much as they should. Below are some of the reasons I observe from our clients under $5 billion in assets:

Emerging leaders are working.

Emerging leaders are running the organization behind the scenes and don’t have time to get away. They occupy entry level, supervisory, and some middle management jobs. They are starting their families and juggling work, family, and community commitments.

There is no money in the budget.

Often there is no money in the budget to attend leadership development focused programs. They are an afterthought. While budgets for certain training to take place, they focus on the technical aspect of the employees’ jobs. The focus on the leadership development of emerging leaders comes second.

Perception that emerging leaders are not loyal.

Financial institutions have been burnt before. They develop a specific emerging leader and just when the employee is ready to take the new job, he or she leaves. The organization is left with no one to occupy the position of an employee who just retired. There is no successor, and they find themselves starting all over again.

Legacy employees don’t leave.

Reasons such as the economic environment, living longer, cost of health insurance, and others, means legacy employees continue to occupy their jobs. I call “legacy employees” those who have been in the same job or same organization for over 20 years and are past the full retirement age.

It starts at the top.

I recently spoke with a CEO who mentioned their institution’s board of directors is comprised of three directors over 60, one over 70, and three over 80 years old! If the Directors are not willing to leave their spots and allow a younger generation to take over, the rest of the institution will follow suit. Why do they not leave? In addition to the reasons stated above that apply to employees, the legacy directors may not fully trust the next generation to take over. When addressing banks, in many instances, these are family-owned and the founders cannot let go because they don’t have successors—or at least successors they trust to take the organization into the future.

The lack of leadership development for the emerging leaders presents a critical risk to community banks and credit unions today and something must be done to change this trend. Below are some ideas you can implement immediately to train the leaders of tomorrow:

Do implement a succession planning process.

The first step is to identify future leaders and successors of key positions in your institution.

Budget for leadership development.

Ensure you budget both for technical training as well as leadership development for the emerging leaders you identify through your succession planning process. In addition, budget for continued leadership development for your senior leadership.

Encourage emerging leaders.

The performance review process is the appropriate time to ask each employee if they aspire to positions of leadership in the future. They don’t necessarily have to desire a senior leadership role. Some of them may be happy to be a supervisor, team lead, or manager of a department. Others may aspire to a “C” level position (i.e., Chief Financial Officer, Chief Credit Officer, etc.).

Mentor future leaders.

Part of a strong Talent Management Program is to establish a formal or informal mentoring program both as you onboard new employees and then as you identify successors. Mentoring employees is part of leadership development.

Hold emerging leaders accountable.

It’s a two-way street. The current senior leadership who mentors and provides opportunities to the emerging leaders must hold them accountable too. The accountability comes in several ways. For example, ask them to share with others what they learned at workshops, seminars, and leadership development programs.

Send them to training.

If you are a senior leader, please send your emerging leaders to leadership development seminars, workshops, and conferences offered by your state associations or other professional institutes. Also, as they grow into their leadership journey, provide executive coaching opportunities so they continue to grow as a leader and learn to deal with special situations.

If you are an emerging leader, go!

If you have been selected to be a successor to a key leadership role or aspire to lead throughout your journey, you must take the time to attend these leadership development opportunities when they present themselves. It is on you to prove and demonstrate to the legacy leaders and board of directors that you can and will take the organization to the next level. Part of demonstrating your desire to lead is to work hard and be loyal to the institution. This is hard to do when the trendy thing to do is to leave a company for the next best opportunity after only a few years of employment. You need to allow your employer time to develop you and to also prove to you that they want you in the organization for the long haul.

So, to answer the question, where are the emerging leaders? If you are reading this article and are currently in leadership, I hope it inspires you to send your emerging leaders to leadership training. If you are an emerging leader, I hope this blog inspires you to go and attend every opportunity you get!

Struggling with succession planning? As always, we’re here to help.