Company
The leading Indian bank is one of India’s first new-generation banks and offers a wide range of banking as well as financial products and services to its customers. The bank operates through its 3120 locations and generates an annual revenue crossing 200 crores.
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Challenge
Every BFSI company strives to generate quality leads and create a seamless process to enable their potential customers to undertake actions that facilitate conversions. For a customer engaging with a bank online, such actions mostly comprise of website visits, calls, lead form fill-ups, direction views, and ultimately, branch visits.
Our client, like any other BFSI brand, aimed to achieve the same but it was struggling with a weak search engine presence, in particular, it’s local presence. Because of this, it received, on average, less than 8 calls a month/location, despite high brand credibility.
When it came to its website’s search presence, the biggest challenge was that its customers were not able to find the right page at the right time. For example, when a customer was looking for the bank’s homepage, the search platforms served them with irrelevant service pages. In addition to this, the bank’s website did not show up when a potential customer was looking for a few relevant services online. This massively reduced the flow of relevant traffic on the bank’s website and ultimately lost the bank some valuable customers.
Additionally, the bank was also struggling with an inadequate local presence. As a result, when a customer searched for the bank or some of its services using ‘nearby searches’, the details of the bank’s relevant local branch/ATM were either missing, inaccurate, incomplete, or not consistent with its details on other platforms such as social media or the bank website. This was a major challenge as it sent away (or lost out on) precious customers who were likely to call the bank, visit it, or engage with it in a valuable way. Not just this, the GMB listings allow users to suggest edits. These edits, on most occasions, reflect only after Google verifies it with the owner of the listings. But, when multiple people take care of 3120 locations, confusions are unavoidable. And, that is exactly what happened. A few fraudulent edits made on the bank’s phone number and address reflected on a few listings and ultimately, resulted in some cases of OTP fraud. This led to grave costs as it tarnished the brand’s reputation.
In this light, the key challenges included:
1. Lack of a strong search engine presence
2. Lack of a strong local presence
3. Lack of data control on digital platforms
Approach
To solve this challenge, we combined the best of technology and human expertise. We employed technology to automate and streamline processes, and human expertise was leveraged for developing pathbreaking solutions that not only increased the quality and quantity of leads generated but also took care of establishing a strong brand image.
We started by working on the on-page and off-page SEO for the bank’s website. This involved adding dynamic sections on their website and targeting relevant keywords for every subdomain. We worked in close collaboration with the bank’s internal team and consistently met tight deadlines.
Besides this, we employed a local MarTech platform (developed by us), Vicinus, to create a single dashboard for managing the local listings of all their ATMs and bank branches, not just on Google but many other platforms like Facebook. By ensuring all their listings were visible, accurate, and consistent across platforms, we were able to establish a strong local presence for the brand at an extraordinarily fast pace and at a very low cost. Finally, our tool also helped us in preventing user edits by putting in place a single source of truth.
Results
After the local presence of the bank improved, and its website SEO was done effectively, our client was able to fully leverage its high brand value on digital platforms.
A good search presence, especially local search presence, helped it engage customers with a high buying intent. Its customers were now easily able to call the bank, locate its website, and locate its branches.
As a result, the following growth was achieved:
1. 300% increase in conversion-led actions
2. 302% increase in average monthly direction views per location
3. 63% increase in average monthly calls per location
4. 41% increase in total website traffic
5. 34% increase in website clicks
We believe that our secret sauce was the balanced use of technology and human skill, which helped us achieve great results. Till date, we continue to work with the leading Indian bank and we could not have been more grateful for this precious partnership.
