Chad Mitchell understands the benefits of storytelling to connect with consumers on a human level. He spent more than eight years at Walmart as senior director of digital communications, working for a brand with a strong content platform. When he joined TD Bank as VP, Head of Content & Digital Platforms, with the mission to tell the story of “America’s Most Convenient Bank,” it was a natural fit.
They are telling the story of a bank that is “unexpectedly human” to disrupt the notion that banking is strictly transactional.
“As a challenger brand in the US, we wanted to separate ourselves from the traditional money centers and really lean into the idea of being a partner in the community, being a fixture of the community, showing up where it matters to help organizations, and spotlighting both what our colleagues do and also the great stories of our customers,” says Mitchell. “We were trying to evolve beyond just press releases and get into the human-focused stories that make our brand special.”
And thus was born TD Stories, a platform where the brand could showcase the real stories of how the bank is impacting the lives of real employees, customers and communities to give both prospects and customers a human face to connect to the brand.
“The content that we have there really gives us the ability to modernize our communications, leapfrog ahead of where we were,” says Mitchell. “We are not light years beyond what other brands are doing, but rather we have caught up and given ourselves the ability to communicate with our key audiences across our footprint.”
TD Bank, which stands for Toronto-Dominion, is headquartered in Canada, proving that the storytelling approach doesn’t stop at the border. TD Stories is also available in Canada, but with stories that are designed to fit the location of the reader.
“One of the keys behind great storytelling is the idea of hyperlocal,” says Mitchell. “When we do things in Harlem for instance, we want to make sure we are delivering that story to a relevant audience, likewise in Canada. We are using geo-targeting and geolocation to serve up a customized experience for people so that they see the content that is most relevant to them.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Mitchell from his home in the DC-Baltimore area to discuss TD Stories, storytelling, and how keywords can help develop content. This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.
What kinds of stories have been resonating on the TD Stories platform?
One of the stories that we are most proud of is about two guys, a same sex couple in Harlem who opened a vodka lounge at the beginning of the pandemic. They found their experience with TD to be so different than what they had previously experienced. We have an entire team committed to helping LGBTQ+ businesses, and this couple ended up switching all their money to TD. That was not the focus of the story, but anecdotally we have learned from the person who runs that team that it has driven new business. He has talked with four subsequent businesses who wanted to do business with TD Banks after reading that story. We are happy to see some of these things come through.
Recently, we offered a new cash back credit card. Our marketing team’s call to action was ‘Sign Up Today To Get A New Credit Card,’ whereas our story was around a survey we did to see what people want from their credit cards, what they would do with cashback savings. Would it go into savings? Would they use it to take a trip? We worked in concert with marketing to find the right place to market this content to raise the profile of this bank, to raise the profile of sales, to deliver direct sales. As we do that, we are creating stories that we think can live pretty much anywhere and can be a soft sell, and get people to consider us.
How does this approach to content help you stand out from the larger banks which might have a bigger brand recognition?
Our size in the US relative to other banks, I think we are the 7th or 8th largest bank, despite being located from Maine to Florida. That footprint is nice, it stretches all the way down the East Coast, but we are not necessarily one of the big banking centers like Wells Fargo or Chase. However, we are bigger than some regional banks. We occupy this niche space where sometimes we are considered, other times we are not. Our purpose with our content is to show that we have a great offering, we are a credible and fair distributor of financial advice, and we have a great product.
We want people to know that TD should be considered, and then we also layer in things like the ‘unexpectedly human’ factor, anecdotal stories about working with us on a community level through the eyes and voices of our customers. We hope that this content will make people want to consider TD for their banking needs. That is where we fit in the typical marketing/sales funnel. We are above the funnel to the top of the funnel, and we want to take the content from Stories and drive it down the funnel until our marketing team comes in to close the deal.
Are you developing content based on consumer keyword behavior?
We work with a content marketing partner called Skyword. They are doing a lot of keyword search for us and search engine optimization. We have an outside consultant who provides an outside-in viewpoint which is tremendously helpful. In my time at Walmart and TD, most brand practitioners get so caught up in the day-to-day fire drills that they might lose that outside perspective. It’s great to work with someone at Skyword and our other consultants who provide those insights. The way that we refer to our banking jargon is not the same way that somebody would look for something. Before I started a TD, I didn’t know what a HELOC is (it’s Home Equity Line Of Credit). Usually somebody takes out a loan on their house to pay for something else like college or home improvement. There are different ways that people inside financial services would search for something versus the way that our customers would. Getting that blend of the outside perspective and then working with our marketing team to see those insights in terms of search volume and page optimization, it’s definitely feeding our storytelling engine.
There are the priorities that the bank has, and then there are the demands that our customers have. The sweet spot for content creators, and certainly the role that our new site is playing is that we take the needs of the customers and we overlay them with what the bank wants to talk about. Brands are always going to have a hundred things that we want to talk about, and customers are probably only going to care about three of them. That doesn’t mean that we can go back to our leadership and say that we aren’t going to talk about the other 97 things, we are just going to prioritize what our customers care about. Modern convenience in the US is a big deal for us in Stories. Financial advice and guidance, helping people navigate the financial journey from start to finish in response to COVID.
How do you expect your storytelling to evolve as the world reopens?
As the world opens back up, we want to be there to capture it. I hope that everyone is beginning to rejoice and get back to life, being able to capture what’s going on at our brand locations. Really documenting the reopenings of our customers is going to be great. This really profound commitment to providing solid financial advice and really showing what we are doing to benefit the communities in which we operate is really what people should expect to see from us over the next year on TD Stories. The way we have created the site and the content pillars speak to those things. It’s really about community, our colleagues, the banking experience, thought-leadership, and press releases in a newsroom.
We really want to be viewed as one of the leading financial institutions in the US for advice and guidance. Ultimately, you hope that that leads to customer acquisition, but we don’t want to position it as: Here is some financial advice and this how to get it at TD. It’s more of the unbranded practical advice that anybody can use whether they want to end up doing business with us or not.
