How to Market Banking to Gen Y

On July 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that “Gen Y lacks confidence about making financial decisions”. Despite stepping up their marketing efforts, investment companies claim that they cannot get the attention of Gen Y.

As an example, Bloomberg Businessweek cites that fewer than 4,000 Facebook users have clicked the “like” button for Fidelity’s Page and about 9,000 have done so for Vanguard’s. Meanwhile 4.2 million people say they like Apple iTunes on Facebook. As another example, Schwab, which began sending Twitter feeds in mid-June 2010, has 277 followers. WholeFoods Twitter account has 1.8 million followers.

Let’s analyze this problem by first realizing that there is a big potential for investment companies to engage Gen Y online, then explaining why social media is not the appropriate media to target Gen Y with banking/investment offers. Last but not least, showing how to market banking/investment to Gen Y.

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Is the iPhone 4 Apple’s Vista?

apple iphone 4 death gripApple’s iPhone 4 just can’t catch a break.

Even though the iPhone 4 had record pre-orders and orders that ended in record sales and excellent initial reviews, recent media coverage has focused on the phone’s “death grip”: a reception problem triggered by touching its antenna as pictured on the left.

To add insult to injury, Microsoft executive Kevin Turner says Apple’s latest smartphone release could fail, just like his own company’s Windows Vista.

Let’s analyze what are the iPhone 4’s current problems.

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World Cup 2010 By The Numbers

spain wins world cup 2010

This World Cup edition was full of excitement, amazing long-range goals, and a psychic octopus!

During this edition of the World Cup, there were big winners such as Spain, a country that gets for the next 4 years to call itself the World Cup Champion. Another big winner, at least on Twitter, was Holland with the TT: ‘Hup Holland Hup’.

There were also losers such as Galvão Bueno, a famous Brazilian narrator and broadcaster, fellvictim of a huge twitter phenomenon when millions of twitter users told him to shut up during the 2010 World Cup opening show. The phenomenon soon became a worldwide joke.

Here is a breakdown of the World Cup 2010 by the numbers.

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The Quest for More Twitter Followers

twitter app windowsIn an earlier guest post by Stacey Cavenagh, she pointed out:

Twitter has proven itself a massively successful social media tool both for recreational and professional networking use. Equally as popular these days with businesses as celebs, the site has exploded into unprecedented popularity over the last 18 months.

But it’s not quite as simple as just logging on, typing up a short message about what breakfast cereal you’re having and then finding instant micro-blogging success. Nope! Gathering followers takes patience and a little imagination with those ‘Tweets’.

Stacey highlights how hard and time-consuming it can be to get more Twitter followers. There are several methods for increasing your follower count, both manual and automatic.

On the automatic side, there are several Twitter apps out there that, when used appropriately, could help you increase your follower count.

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Keeping Up with the Community

online community[This is a guest post from Amy G. Howard, Founder of Raleigh Special Tonight. Follow her at @amgenove.]

Running a hyper-local website about daily specials can be quite grueling. In order to keep readers, you need to update at least once a day, or people will stop visiting your site. Raleigh Specials Tonight averages about 600-800 hits per week and 50% of that traffic is returning. I have very loyal readers and I am grateful for that, but I know I need to keep coming with the content if I want it to stay that way.

Where do I find daily content for my site every day? When I first started the site about a year ago, it was tough. I had to seek the information myself by going to individual restaurant websites. I still do that occasionally, but here are some tools I use to keep up with my community so I always have fresh content:

4 Tips for a Successful Email Newsletter

mailchimp logoThrough LinkedIn (find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/ddavila) and Twitter (@idaconcpts), I receive a lot of questions about marketing and web analytics.

By far, most business owners and marketing consultants have questions regarding how to get started with an email newsletter.

Often I direct them to these 4 Steps to Get Started on Email Marketing. Once email marketing practitioners have a solid foundation and have mastered the basics, then we can start talking about content creation.

Here are 4 tips on content creation for a succesful email newsletter and how 4 companies (Facebook, Shutterfly, Bing and Evernote) implement these tips.

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e-Mail Marketing: Template vs Plain Text

e-mail marketing template vs text[This is a guest post from Zachary Zawarski of Zadling, a Google Apps Consultant]

Two email newsletters that I signed up for were Mike Michalowicz and Brian Tracy’s newsletters. Most of you probably know Brian Tracy, a self-help author who mostly helps salespeople. Mike Michalowicz, who might be slightly less known than Brian Tracy, but still immensely popular as you may have seen him on MSNBC or CNBC, is the man behind The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. Being an entrepreneur myself, I set out to gain some resources that would help me increase my own sales, so I subscribed to each of their newsletters.Like I discussed in my last guest blog, email marketing is all about constantly providing your subscribers with value and not constantly bombarding them with your sales message because they’ll quickly unsubscribe if all they’re seeing is sales copy rehashed week after week.

Both Mike and Brian have very different email styles. Brian Tracy has a template design. The email is formatted nicely with various images and colors and with a footer full of resources such as links to his website and links to his Facebook and Twitter pages.  Mike, on the other hand, uses no images or color at all — just plain text.

So who do you think has a better and more effective email marketing campaign?

Doodle4Google World Cup Edition

Doodle4Google World Cup Winner - KoreaOver the years, doodles on the Google homepage have made searching on Google more fun and enjoyable for its users worldwide. When doodles were first created, nobody had anticipated how popular and integral they would become to the Google search experience. Nowadays, many users excitedly anticipate the release of each new doodle and some even collect them!

Doodle4Google’s are known as the decorative changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists and scientists.

Given that this year, the 2010 edition of the World Cup is happening, it is not a surprise that the biggest sports event in the world has taken over a lot of the Doodle4Google’s of June 2010.

Here’s the Doodle4Google World Cup Edition. Let me know what’s your favorite at the comments section.

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3 Examples of World Cup Marketing with Meaning

Depending on your time zone, keeping up with all of the matches from the World Cup can be a daunting task.

Several companies have taken notice of this task and have come up with a series of good solutions for how to stay on top of games from the World Cup 2010.

Let’s take a look at the latest efforts from Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google.

I have selected these 3 companies because they are very good examples of the current trend of moving away past from Seth Godin’s permission marketing, and providing not only non-intrusive marketing but also ‘marketing with meaning’ and marketing that makes a repetitive user’s task easier.

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