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.

One of the biggest challenges Community Banks and Credit Unions face today is turning Treasury Management services from free to fee. Regardless of where our clients are within the U.S., they share a common frustration: bankers are giving the Treasury Management services away for free. It’s a “culture thing,” they tell me. We need to then change the culture by learning about TM services and valuing the depository side of the balance sheet.

If you have been given the monumental task to start, formalize, or “fix” your Treasury Management department, this blog is for you! Below are five steps you can take in the right direction:

Stop Waiving Fees!

The first step should be to simply stop waiving fees immediately. Stop the bleeding! Nobody expects to go to a grocery store and walk out with a free pound of best quality steak, just because the cashier chose to give it away for free. The same way, bankers should not give away these important and valuable services. Bankers should have a good business reason to give away a TM service and document the reason. I make the analogy to a “best quality steak” because TM services are very expensive services to provide, and you are missing a huge fee income opportunity. When I coached a client to quantify how much the $2 billion dollar institution was waiving on TM fees, the total came to $1 million dollars a year! Can you afford to give away this kind of money?

Educate Your Business Bankers on Treasury Management Services

It is imperative that business development officers obtain the proper training on all the available Treasury Management services your organization offers and possibly obtaining the Certified Treasury Professional designation. If your business model is to service small businesses and/or mid to large corporations, those businesses expect you to offer the more sophisticated banking services they need to run their businesses. If you expect to attract larger companies, then you must offer the depository products (the correct type of checking account that produces an Account Analysis Statement) and the Treasury Management services they typically use to help them manage their cash and streamline their operations.

Educate Your Business Clients on Treasury Management

Now that your business development officers understand the value of each TM service, they are ready to offer these services to your business clients. The same way they explain how the appropriate loan structure deserves a specific rate due to the risk exposure the institution carries, they should explain why there is a fee to use the right depository services. Incentivizing your sales team to sell TM services is perfectly appropriate if you want to compete for and attract larger businesses.

Understand and Embrace that TM Services Are Technology Services

It is crucial to understand and embrace that all the TM services your institution offers are, in fact, technology-based services. Therefore, you must support them as such. How do you support technology services? Start with keeping track of all the issues (“tickets”) related to each product. Track the resolution time and ensure complete customer satisfaction with the results—consistently. When you take this approach, then your customer service level will truly achieve “excellence” which is what every institution strives to provide.

It All Starts with The Tone at the Top

As with every strategic objective a Board of Directors plans to achieve, it all starts with the tone at the top regarding the TM services. The directive to formalize or start or develop your Treasury Management department must come from the Board. When your institution embraces the incredible value that each TM service provides to your commercial clients, there will be no question as to why you must charge for these services. You are now on your way to turning Treasury Management services from “free to fee.”

Community Banks and Credit Unions are in dire need to attract core deposits as a primary funding source and to increase non-interest fee income. Treasury Management is a “treasure” your institution must mine to not only provide your commercial clients top of the line TM services, but to also provide or increase your non-interest fee income.

Struggling with Treasury Management services and how they fit into your business service offerings? As always, 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.