NAB keeps it social post break-up

Since the "break-up" campaign launched by National Australia Bank in mid-February, evidence of the success of this shift in marketing by the bank has been hard to find.

NAB's executive general manager of marketing, Sandra de Castro, told Banking Day that the response to the campaign "has been huge".

The bank claims that in the first three weeks of the campaign, it experienced a 20 per cent increase in new accounts, a 50 per cent increase in credit card applications and a 35 per cent increase in mortgage inquiries.

There was a 45 per cent increased in new customers looking at switching to the NAB for re-mortgage applications.

De Castro said that while the initial heavy 24-hour marketing blitz felt to the public as if it was a fresh concept, it was actually an initiative that was 21 months in the making. This element of fresh disruption, said de Castro, is one of the keys to making a campaign like this work.

"We were being tarred with the brush of the Big Four.  How do you get people to stop and listen; how do you get through to the consumer? The only way we can do that is with credibility."

De Castro said that the success of the campaign had come from the fact that the "break-up" theme mirrored what the bank had been doing to differentiate itself in the market

"We had a fantastic story to tell, coming from the fact that we were doing very important things and we wanted to make that very visible to the public," she said. And, in terms of media attention, and in the context of interest rate hikes, the timing was right.

The response from social media was impressive. In the first week of the campaign the activity produced 100,000 visits to the blog about the campaign, and people are still going, with numbers exceeding the 250,000 point and still trending upwards, she said. In addition, the YouTube site attracted 74,000 visits in the first week.

Chris Smith, general manager digital at NAB, said the commitment to social media was part of a cultural change that has been steadily evolving within the bank for over a year.

"Social media is another pillar and another strategy to communicate with our customers.

"We see that social media is the way of getting into a two-way conversation with our customers," Smith said.

He added that with Australians spending an average of seven to eight hours a month on social media, it represented a new opportunity to make banking easier for people.

Smith's 200-strong team has been rebuilding NAB's web presence, and it was behind the development of its Twitter, Facebook and YouTube presence.

NAB introduced its Twitter presence in August last year and now has 4600 followers while NAB on Facebook has attracted more than 7000 fans.

These connections have the merit of, potentially, offering a two-way conversation between the bank and its customers, though the numbers are slight compared with the hundreds of thousands of prospective customers reached by conventional paid advertising.

The 7000 followers of NAB on Twitter compares with 4100 for Westpac and 3000 for Commonwealth Bank (under the Netbank handle).

ANZ, along with Suncorp and most of the smaller banks (bar Rabobank), have been slow movers in the use of social media.

NAB's numbers, even if still only in four figures for social media followers, are encouraging to those responsible for the campaign.

"There is no doubt that what the break-up campaign has shown is that customers want to follow up and interact," Smith said, adding that this mode of customer interaction will only get bigger and stronger.

"It has been huge, and it's exciting that people have taken an interest and (the campaign) has struck a chord. It's not just a fling, we have made fundamental changes," de Castro added.