St George makes a splash in the search results with its new savings product.
Today I noticed a new campaign running by St George and was interested to see how effective their online strategy would match and if it even existed. At The Lost Agency we often see large offline marketing campaigns are launched without an effective or even any complimentary digital campaign.
Since there are other banks who have similar products overseas, we thought we would review their product message and how at a basic level they performed in Google search result.
St George performed well above my expectations around the product name controlling the first 6 results and also the single AdWords displayed.
Often product reviews or investment websites will show up high in the results but St George effectively controlled all the results shown above the fold.
To test a very generic single product keyword “Sense”, did not show St George in the organic results but was visible as the single AdWords displayed.
St George Bank’s new saving product “St George Sense” and this product is similar to a product Lloyds TSB released several months ago called “Save the Change” where users of its debit card can save easily. In the US Bank of America has its own similar saving product “Keep the Change“.
The St George product is quite broad in its offering covering FreedomCard, ATM Cards, and BPay will be rounded, but limits purchases made in Australian dollars to merchants in Australia. This means that you won’t be able to get the double benefit of overseas shopping cashbacks offered by PayPal.
Lloyds TSB has had their product in the market longer and you would expect more control over the search results in Google.co.uk but this was not the case.
The first two results were controlled by Lloyds TSB but the 3rd result was for a Money Saving forum and the 4th result was for Microsoft Windows. This showed that they have not effectively controlled the organic rankings.
The Lloyds TSB product appears to be marketed slightly better with a simple message of that they will round up the amount to the nearest pound and transfer the difference into your savings account.
The product name selected by Lloyds TSB also explains the product in simple terms that consumers understand and match the digital message.
The product names chosen by Lloyds TSB and Bank of America also seems to be better suited to being easily remembered by consumers. To reduce the risk of becoming a generic term they have both registered trademarks of the product name.
The Bank of America product seeks to further improve and indirectly with its 5% matching of your savings transfers. Offering 100% for the first 3 months with a cap on this bonus limited at $250 per year. While these are great they make the product much more complicated to market and more confusing for consumers.
Bank of America’s results on Google.com showed that like Lloyds TSB they only control the first 2 results with random results showing that are not related or discuss Bank of America’s products. There is also a state specific landing page that means inbound links are split and their competitors could easily rank well for their product stealing their potential customers.
The problem is consumers can be easily confused so companies need to work to ensure they have more control over the search results when building new brands or products. Also since they are marketing and building a new product they should be following St George’s lead in reinforcing the message with Google AdWords.
From a product perspective Lloyds TSB wins for a simple message but St George seeks to win the most from its campaign with total control of the search results and we like that.