How Bell Bank lifted engagement 40% by ditching industry norms

Marie Obsuna, (​@mobsuna), Digital Marketing Manager at Bell Bank, kept seeing other banks post the same kind of content: straightforwardly educational, blandly informational, safely on-brand. Bell Bank had tried this approach too. The problem was that it didn't work. The bank had a genuinely loyal following, especially in its home market of North Dakota, but no clear way to prove to leadership what was actually driving that loyalty versus what just looked like standard industry practice.

Using Tagging and Reporting in Sprout Social, Marie's team categorized content by theme and format across channels, then let the performance data override prior assumptions about what a successful bank's online content should look like. As the team implemented the data-informed content strategy, total engagement rate across all channels rose 40% year over year, while overall reach declined as they focused more squarely on their target audience.
 

Letting the data override the standard industry playbook

The real validation came during Bell Bank's 2025 Performance Recap, when profile, post and paid performance reports made a pattern impossible to ignore: culture-driven content like employee recognition, values-based storytelling, milestones celebrations, and trend-driven graphics consistently outperformed the educational content the team had been using as benchmarks against competitors.

"Sprout was not a passive reporting tool in this process, it was the engine behind our strategic shift. Through consistent content tagging combined with channel-level analytics and demographic insights, we identified which themes and formats resonated most on each platform. That gave us the confidence to bring clear, data-backed findings to marketing leadership to support the case for an intelligent change in our social strategy." — Marie Obsuna, Digital Marketing Manager, Bell Bank
 

The how

Marie's team moved from a high-volume publishing habit to a channel-specific, audience-informed strategy:

• Tagging content to see what works: Before tagging, the team could see they were posting frequently, but had no clear read on what was actually working. Categorizing posts by theme and format with tags turned a volume-based approach into a measurable and strategic one, revealing that culture and human-interest content consistently beat the educational posts other banks were leaning on.
• Matching content type to funnel: Marie and team structured reporting to match each channel to its role in the funnel. This channel-level reporting showed LinkedIn driving the highest engagement rates and link clicks, making it the team's primary driver of meaningful interaction, while Instagram carried top-of-funnel visibility through Reels and carousels, and Facebook anchored community engagement and awareness. This alignment of channel to funnel role allowed the team to shift channel strategies for greatest business impact.
• Identifying and activating brand ambassadors: Performance data helped the team pinpoint which of its Bell Champions—the company’s brand ambassadors—connected most strongly with followers, making specific ambassador content features intentional and strategic.
• Reading real-time cultural moments: A security team photo of a bear wandering through the bank’s ATM drive-through in Fargo, North Dakota, turned into the bank's best-performing post to date. Similarly, a pop-culture-timed Instagram post reached far outside the bank's usual audience. The team was able to react quickly, confirming with reporting data that these outsized engagements weren't flukes but signals of what culturally relevant, human-centered content could do for brand reach.
   

The business impact

That data didn't stay confined to content decisions; it changed how leadership understood social media as a business function. When we noticed executive’s children engaging with a pop-culture post from the brand, and bankers came into work excitedly describing their kids showing them the same content, it reframed social media efforts from a tactical marketing line item into something leadership saw as a real business driver. That shift to employee-led, human content showed up again when a competitor was acquired by a larger institution: Bell Bank's community of employees and customers organically stepped in to recommend the bank to people asking for alternatives. This represented a new level of peer-led advocacy the team could see and measure as an outcome of a thoughtful content strategy developed in the months and years prior.
 

What could this look like for your team?

If your content strategy is built on industry norms, what would it take to test those assumptions? What’s unique about your brand that sets it apart from competitors, and how does your social strategy reinforce those differences? Is there a big brand risk you’d love to take? The Arboretum community and our Sprout experts would love to daydream new content approaches with you!