The Best Bank Marketing Strategies Have These Three Layers
Great bank marketing strategies find a balance of Brand, Local, and Personal components.
Most banks do Local quite well - it’s in your nature to be out in the community, and opportunities for local sponsorships often come knocking at your door (literally). Combined with your great staff and service, it may be enough for smaller banks.
But if you’re looking to grow (either in overall assets, or even if like many banks right now, you’re flush with deposits and looking to grow loans), you need more than just Local. Most bank product sales - especially the ones that drive the most profit - still require the handshake, but handshakes are much harder to get to if your loan officers are spending a lot of time explaining who the bank is and why the prospect should care.
The solution to that is in the Brand and Personal bubbles.
Brand and Local are two sides of the same coin: they are both continuous, never-ending campaigns that help you build up goodwill and brand awareness (how your institution is “thought of” when people are looking for a solution). You need to inject new energy into the campaigns from time to time to keep them fresh, but they are always-on. The consistency really matters - consistency breeds trust. If you pause and restart, or skip a long-standing partnership one year, people will start to think that something’s awry with your bank (maybe not consciously, of course, but the thought is there).
Personal is the hard one. With a small team or limited marketing budget, how can you possibly personalize your campaigns for your thousands of customers? Technology is the obvious answer, but even then, you may not have the skills in house to manage or use the tech. It’s near impossible to run dozens of simultaneous campaigns without automation. But the Personal layer is the one that drives leads and sales.
Let’s go into more depth on each of the layers.
Brand
Your Brand is the heart and soul of your bank. It’s what differentiates you from other community banks. It’s what makes you stand out and stay top of mind when consumers or businesses need banking services.
Your brand is made up of lots of different components, or assets. The best brands are great at creating many different assets, and putting them everywhere - which leads to more brand awareness. But it’s not just about the numbers. Brand assets consist of colors, sounds, fonts, taglines, shapes, and human elements like spokespeople or customer testimonials. The more of these you have, and the more consistent you are with them (always using the same set of colors and fonts, for example) - the more brand awareness you can get. Here’s an article I wrote for The Financial Brand that dives deep into this topic.
Once your brand assets are in place, your marketing campaign should have an always-on brand awareness “layer”. These are things that tell your stories - how you help the community in ways no other bank (large, small, digital, physical) can. You can put them out on paid ads (like YouTube, Facebook, Google), through social media, even billboards or local newspaper ads. The strategy for where to do it is a deeper discussion - check out The Bank Marketing Show, we’ve got a few episodes on this.
With brand campaigns, you’re a storyteller, not a salesperson. Tell the story, expect no response. But tell it over and over again. In the Personal and Local layers (which we’ll talk about over the next few newsletters), we’ll be asking more directly for the business. But here, just talk about the accessibility ramp your team built at a veteran’s house, talk about your scholarship program, talk about the donation or friendly terms you gave to a local business to keep them operating.
That’s it. Just tell the story. Don’t ask for anything. Be consistent. There’s not a ton of ROI in a brand awareness campaign by itself - but it will vastly improve the ROI of your overall marketing program when run in conjunction with Personal and Local campaigns, which we’ll talk about in the next few weeks.
Local
Local is where most community banks are most comfortable - in fact, this layer is where we spend the least time with our clients. Local Marketing is all the feet-on-the-street activities you do - booths at local fairs, participation in parades, sponsorships of the high school, teaching financial education to middle schoolers, attending chamber of commerce events, and even your physical signage at your branches and around town.
Two points I want to make about this: 1) it's important and 2) you should treat your Local marketing budget separate from Brand and Personal marketing.
It's important because you're going to be much better at it than bigger banks - even if they're at the same events, it's not the same when the big New York bank is there and sends a loan officer from out of town, vs you sending someone that grew up locally and knows everyone. And looking at it from the other perspective, if you're NOT present locally, it can cause a lot of harm to your brand image.
Why should you treat it separately from your Brand and Personal marketing budgets? Because there's really no immediate ROI. Sponsorships and participation in parades should not be thought of as advertising. They raise awareness of your bank, but they don't drive direct business: people will still go Google you, look at your website and social content, and that of your competitors, before they walk into a branch. So if you're present at the parade but have a terrible website or no Google presence, that time and money for the parade was wasted. You need all three layers - brand, personal, and local. So, Local is very important - you should budget for it - but not at the expense of Brand and Personal.
I see so many banks looking to get into digital and personalized campaigns that shift budget away from the Local marketing, only to regret it later. So keep it up - maybe do slightly less local newspaper advertising :) - but treat it separately from the other layers.
Personal
The Personal layer is where you start asking for the business. Hopefully, you've built up lots of goodwill with your Brand and Local campaigns, and now you can layer on specific asks - but only if they are relevant. We're not doing "It's Chevy Month!" ads here - rather, it's trying to show the most relevant message or offer to each person.
To understand this better, and for some inspiration, look at the venn diagram above, and let’s walk through each example:
Personalized website content
This is tricky without the right website platform. But, it is possible to know who someone is when they visit your website, before they even log in. If you have this ability, you can know if they are a) an existing customer and what products they may have with you, or b) if they're not a current customer.
Armed with that knowledge, the right website tool can help you show different home page images depending on the person's profile. An existing customer with only a checking account can see loan ads, and vice versa. A non-customer can see a branding message to get to know the bank better, along with an invitation for a free consultation.
(This ignores landing page strategy - which is another ballgame that we'll address in the future, where you can tell a lot about a person's needs based on the ad they click on).
Micro-segmented emails
If you blanket your entire customer base with offers all the time, they will start to subconsciously assume that your emails are not relevant to them (even when, down the line, they are). It's a boy-who-cried-wolf situation - how can you expect people to listen to just the few emails a year that are actually relevant to them? Especially when they're hit with likely dozens of emails per day across all their subscriptions from other companies.
Better to send fewer emails and only when they're relevant.
How do you do this though? You'll have to do some data analysis to figure out who might be most in line for a particular product. People spending a lot at home improvement stores may be ripe for a HELOC ad. People who have a mortgage payment going outside of the bank every month might read a mortgage refi email. People with high daily deposit balances may listen to a wealth management pitch.
For more on this topic, check out this article I wrote for the Business Journals.
Personal Letters and Calls
Your commercial team will tell you that the handshake seals the deal - they're not winning large commercial loans from ads or emails alone (but note, that Brand and Local campaigns play a huge part in shortening the commercial sales cycle!). Well, the same can be true on the retail side as well, it's just harder to do it at scale across all your customers. The good news is, you don't need to. If you've already segmented your customers for emails, you can follow up with these same groups via phone calls and personal letters. The more "touches" you have, the more likely they are to respond. Set up a campaign over a 3-4 month long period where you 1) identify a target group for a particular product, 2) send multiple emails, phone calls, and handwritten postcards or letters, and 3) track how much response you get.
Short-term campaigns on specific customer problems
Enhance the email, letters, calls, and personalized website content with paid search, social, and video ads on the same topics. Facebook allows you to upload a list of customer emails and target those people directly (there are size limitations on the lists though). Video and display ads let you target people who are likely in market for particular products, so you can be pretty sure you'll align with their needs. If you have search ads aligned to your micro-segments, you'll be sure to capture their attention there too (after all, even with personalized letters and calls, people will still Google you, or Google to look at competition...you want to be present there as well! When they're Googling, they're very close to the purchase point).
Putting it all into action
Brand
Continuous campaigns, year-round. Develop 3-5 stories about how your bank has helped your communities. Then:
Create short videos to tell each story. Interview customers, show the changes you’re making in town that no one else is.
Write blog articles/advertorials/local news coverage around the stories.
Spin up always-on ads on a few platforms (start with Facebook and YouTube, but you can go beyond too)
Share the stories over email to current customers - remind them why they bank with you.
Local
Frankly, you’re probably already great at this! Keep doing what you’re doing. Just make sure you’re participating in several different local “things” - sponsorships, events for retail customers, events for business customers. And don’t rely too heavily on local newspaper for results - treat it more like a sponsorship.
Personal
Start with 3-5 micro-segments/hyperniches. You don’t need hundreds or even dozens, it will be too hard to manage without a proper marketing technology platform.
Pick micro-segments that are highly important for your bank. Don’t ask questions like, “what do we need to sell more of?” - but rather, “what are our strengths?” and “why do people choose us?” - you’ll find great opportunities here.
Starting with just a few micro-segments means that not all customers will be contacted - but that’s ok right now. You’ll get more business from a deep focus on a few segments, than the broad focus on a lot of them.
Your goal is to create high-touch campaigns - not just one email, but the combination of email, letters, calls, and ads all to the same small group of customers, will create that feeling that your bank is everywhere. And you’ll be unmissable to those people actually shopping for bank products.
By making sure you’ve got all three layers covered, you’ll have a robust marketing program that will put you on par and beyond your competitors.