Andy Lark is Chief Marketing Officer at CommBank, he shares how social channels work for the bank.

Before joining Commbank, Lark led Dell’s global marketing division. “Whilst at Dell, I held variety of roles, including chief marketing officer for Dell Enterprise, vice president global communications and branding; and, vice president, Dell.com – the world’s largest eCommerce site. Prior to this I built and lead start-ups and did the marketing for Fortune 500 companies,” Lark explains.

CommBank doubles up on digital

Lark recently announced that CommBank would double its digital and media spend. When asked if he considered the bank’s social media activity to be customer service, marketing or PR focused, he saw it as a combination. “Social channels are customer facing and have definitely emerged as a popular way for our customers to get in touch and provide feedback as well as seek advice and information,” he says. “It can be done from anywhere, as long as you have access to a smart phone or computer and you can pretty much get a response in real-time. In saying this, it doesn’t take away from the fact that over 10 million Australians are on Facebook and almost 2 million Australians are on Twitter – so it very much about using these channels to market to an active audience.”

Facebook

Lark sees the key to CommBank’s success on Facebook as a result of focus on content and customer service. ”We have worked hard to develop a content strategy which has resulted in multiple ground-breaking social campaigns. Running alongside this, we have paid tremendous attention to creating an environment for the community to unite, share suggestions, seek advice and receive active real-time responses directly from the Bank’s dedicated customer service team.”

Social v traditional media

“It depends on who you are trying to target and what your campaign messages are, but Social Media channels are as important, if not more, than traditional advertising channels – the figures speak for themselves – almost half of all Australians are on Facebook, this isn’t something that is going to go away soon,” says Lark, pointing out the advantage of engagement in social channels. “They are critical channels for driving engagement. While other channels are great for transmitting messages, few offer the degree of engagement Facebook does.”

Talk-ability

Lark believes the key elements of a social media campaign need to foster engagement. “It needs to create talk-ability and be engaging so that people want to share; simple – easy to engage with and participate. It needs to be supported with relevant content in other channels and aligned to channel audience behaviour.”

Measurement

Aside from meeting campaign objectives, Lark says metrics including: shares, likes, views, offer take ups, and comments are used to measure campaign performance.

Team

At CommBank, social media is executed by the channel marketing team which reports to Lark. “We have a dedicated team for social – however it is every marketer’s role at the bank to integrate social as part of their campaigns.”