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Stories of Success: The #BankBlack Campaign
How do you build a social media campaign for a bank that is authentically grounded in community pride with the hashtag #BankBlack? How do you do it without offending any one? How do you do it and avoid sounding the same? These are just some of the hard questions I asked myself when beginning the work of creating the lead messaging and marketing campaign for OneUnited Bank.
What Should the #BankBlack Campaign Look and Sound Like?
As my background is primarily in graphic and web design, when I began outlining the strategy for the #BankBlack campaign I started with look and feel. I created several templates for content silos that would fill the bank’s active social channels – Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – that would become the hallmark of the campaign. I focused on developing the core calls to action for the campaign – #BankBlack, #BuyBlack, Move Your Money/Move Your Mind, Take the Challenge, and Join the Movement – and created the set of criteria for how the visuals for each of these content silos should look.
Once I was happy with the visual aesthetic of the content silos, I moved on to crafting the over all tone, usage cadence, and success KPIs for the campaign overall. Working with a small team we began building quarterly editorial calendars that worked in concert with planned website, email, and digital ad campaigns. The result was a clean, modern, authentic and relevant feeling messaging campaign for the bank. Each social channel has content unique from the other social channels. Each social channel features content designed to resonate with that particular audience. It was labor intensive work, but it made a difference.
In just under 2 years, the Facebook audience grew organically from 10k+ fans to over 180k+ fans. Instagram grew from 0 fans to over 44k, and even the ever moving Twitter audience grew from 500+ fans to over 5k. Impressions went from the thousands to double digit millions. All of this was driven by content created with purpose that generated results.
The Results Are In
How successful was – well, is – the #BankBlack campaign? Millions of new dollars entered the bank driven by new internet customers. More and more partners from around the country are working with the bank to spread the message and move dollars into Black owned businesses. In mid-2016 the campaign hashtag was a trending hashtag on Twitter, and media hits from publications around the country appear regularly citing OneUnited Bank as the thought leader of the #BankBlack movement.