NOTE: This article was originally published in the December 2019 issue of Great Lakes Banker Magazine.

As the new year approaches, is your bank setting budgets and goals for 2020? Are you giving your marketing plan the attention it deserves? Or is it taking a back seat to things like new products and tech upgrades?

Without a dedicated marketing staff, it can be difficult to prioritize the kinds of strategies that ultimately lead to new customers. But consider: marketing is the only way to introduce new people to your bank. So, if you’re aiming to grow or appeal to new customers in 2020, here are five steps you can take with your existing team to set your bank up for marketing success in the new year.

1. Dream.

Envision where you want to be at the end of next year, or even two to three years beyond that. A useful thought exercise is to picture your bank having rousing success, meeting all of its goals – and getting featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. What would you want the headline to say? Spend five minutes brainstorming, either alone or with a small team. Everything in your plan should get you closer to that headline.

2. Analyze.

Think about your market overall, your competitors, and your best customers.

• Identify your customers. Customers are as varied as their ages and incomes, but they can still be organized and addressed by the needs and priorities that they share. Create a profile of an average customer in each desired group: what are their life goals and challenges? How can your bank help them get there?

• Analyze your competitors. Acquisitions, openings, closings, special offers, and new advertising activity can all be catalysts – good and bad – for your competition. They can also provide opportunities for your message to break through. What’s happening in your market that you can leverage?

• Find your tactics. What’s the best way to reach each desired customer group, given all that's going on in your market? Think about where your customers spend their time – social, digital, offline, even specific places in town. Brainstorm a list. Be sure to consider methods you’ve never tried, or even don’t have the skills for. For example, if you want to attract younger customers, you need to be on digital to reach them. What are the best ways to accomplish that?

3. Budget.

Set your budget. This varies for every bank and market, but a broad rule of thumb is to allocate 0.05% - 0.1% of your assets as your marketing budget. A $100M bank may have $50,000-$100,000 in marketing budget, but this will vary depending on ambitions, market size, and level of competition

4. Plan.

Plot your tactics from Step 2 onto a quarterly plan. Make sure it’s achievable, and remember that you can’t do everything at once. Your goal for each quarter should be to do just a little more than the previous one.

5. Execute.

Complete the activities in your plan, but also have regular (monthly or quarterly) meetings with your team to review performance. What’s working, what’s not, and what did you run out of time for? Use this information to tweak next quarter’s plan. Aim for a snowball effect: build upon previous successes and add a little more activity each quarter.

Not every bank requires outside help in executing their plan – but you shouldn’t dismiss it, especially if your bank is too small to warrant a dedicated marketing staff. You wouldn’t hire a farmer to lead a compliance audit, so find a professional to provide insights and feedback on your plan, or to assist with tactics and technologies that you may be unfamiliar with.

Most banks can accomplish the first four steps over the course of a week or two, and in just a few meetings with key staff. Give your marketing plan the front seat it deserves along with your bank’s other 2020 plans, and you’ll reach next December much closer to your vision for your bank.