"We have been extremely pleased with the blogs that Merrill Anderson prepared for us. The FB posts you provided me with were right on point"
Ira Brower - President
Garden State Trust Company, Toms River, NJ
The inside story behind the success.
Build your digital reputation.
Differentiate yourself.
There is one way to market yourself that can bring prospects to your door without leveraging a large physical footprint or bank assets:
Digital exposure.
Having a website may mean that you have exposure digitally, but it doesn't mean that you're gaining digital exposure. To gain digital exposure you need to compete on the world's largest stage, and to do that you need to provide a reason for people to visit or subscribe.
Enter: The Garden State Trust Company
Ira Brower has high standards, and won't provide a sub-standard product to his clients or hire any vendors that do either.
Ira has worked with an outside marketing firm that has created a beautiful website with superb design work, but a lack of understanding of trust services and their value proposition.
Ira created the initial content for the website, but needed to give people a reason to keep coming, a way to keep in touch with those that did, and leverage the social media following he had been developing at events. Unfortunately, Ira's focus needed to be on other core aspects of his company.
Enter: The Merrill Anderson Co.
After speaking with Ira, we were gratified to have a solution immediately for him:
Access to our library of educational financial articles with new articles each month, that could be personalized and positioned within his blog.
He could keep using his preferred design firm, and utilize the text from us that expressed his trust company's value proposition.
This was perfect to start, and his trust company continued to grow and grow. We kept in touch, making sure the articles were working for him and seeing if there any way for us to improve our value proposition as part of our automate and audit approach.
The Garden State Trust Company had grown from 4 employees to 10, increased their physical footprint to 4 locations, and to 400+ social media followers in the three short years we worked together. Time to leverage the digital brand even more.
We've added custom writing into the mix that matches his brand tone. Weekly social media blurbs, and an additional blog post each month that has a larger focus on New Jersey or pop culture.
Everything is personally approved by Ira to ensure that we're still meeting his high standards, and in the rare case that our content didn't match his expectations, we rewrite it at no additional charge. That has only happened once so far.
When we checked in to see how the social media blurbs and blogs were working out - here's the response we received:
We have been extremely pleased with the blogs that Merrill Anderson prepared for us. The FB posts you provided me with were right on point. Very good!
Ira Brower
President and Chief Executive Officer
Garden State Trust Company
We're proud to be creating efficiency for Ira so he can focus on what he wants to focus on, his clients.
Beyond these marketing efforts he's taken an extra step to support his local community by distributing content from our Keeping Our Seniors Safe program to raise awareness of the growing issue of Senior Financial Exploitation.
