Write to a person, not a crowd

Writing can be intimidating. Between the blinking cursor overlooking the blank page and plain old self-doubt, it’s tough to get started.

Here’s some good news: there are a few things that separate poor writing from mediocre writing. And one item that can boost mediocre writing to good, or even very good writing.

So, what’s the difference between poor writing and mediocre writing? Generally, it’s pretty simple: the technicals. Poor grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. 

For poor writing, there are easy fixes: 

I’m serious. That’s it.

You can communicate the facts in an acceptable way with these rules. You may even surpass mediocrity. You can be funny, interesting, and even compelling. It worked for Ernest Hemingway—but I’m not promising anything more than decent.

Bank writing is full of long, meandering sentences and circuitous thoughts. It’s much better to get to the point with clarity and brevity. Most of the content you’ll write will communicate features of complex financial products in the simplest terms.

Try me out. Rewrite the sentence below using shorter, more direct, sentences.

To get the most out of your account, download our new mobile application and you’ll get all the features and benefits of a visit to the bank right in your hand.

So, now you’re ready to move from mediocre to good. Are you ready for that one tip?

Write to an individual instead of an audience.

Sometimes, it’s easy and overt:

Mediocre: Everyone will love XYZ Bank.

Good: You’ll love XYZ Bank.

It’s a one word change that makes a difference.

Other times, it’s a bit more nuanced:

Mediocre: We have banking solutions for every need!

Good: We specialize in enhancing your life with our products.

This change is more about tone. Again, it relies on simply using a second-person pronoun. And the second statement doesn’t sound like it’s being read from a stage.

Therein lies the difference. Too many folks sit down to write and imagine they’re walking up to a lectern on a huge stage, with blinding lights in their eyes—getting ready to deliver a masterpiece to throngs of people. You think of your advertising audience as a literal audience.

That just isn’t the case. While you might be writing to tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people, each one of those people will likely engage with your messaging individually.

One person at a time sees a digital ad on his/her phone. If you don’t think that is a personal experience, try grabbing a stranger’s phone, or peeking over a stranger’s shoulder to read the ads as they scroll.

Even a more public medium like a billboard is more personal than you think. Most reactions happen internally. It’s the voice in your head that says, “Hm. It might be a good idea to switch banks.”

Your audience is not gathered in one place, holding similar beliefs, or even thinking alike. You must write your ad copy, blogs, social text, etc., as though you’re talking to another individual, looking her/him in the eyes.

Again, sometimes this is in the basic wording. In many cases, it’s all in your approach—how you visualize your audience when you write.

So, the next time you sit down to write, imagine the person you really want to convince. The words might not come easily, but the message will be better once it emerges.

Mabus Agency’s Guide to Getting Ahead While Remaining Relevant Online

Let’s set the scene. You walk into your bank on Monday morning, and suddenly you remember you have to coordinate all the social media posts for the upcoming week.

If your plan is to create one social post for every workday of the year, that’s 260 posts (5 posts/week x 52 weeks). And, quite honestly, that isn’t enough. At Mabus, we have a quota of 15 (gasp!) posts per day. The reason? I think we do at least that many noteworthy things. Between multiple offices and several dozen ridiculously talented coworkers and clients, we have plenty to talk about.

I know what you’re thinking: “Easy for an agency to say! What about my bank?!”

Ok, so you might not have 15 things to talk about in a single day, and right now, 260 posts a year just sounds outrageous. This is probably true, especially if you treat your social accounts like most do—by starting the day with a blank slate and a few vague ideas of what to post about.

Speaking of vague ideas, poor planning is the most common denominator in subpar social media management. Don’t get me wrong: Planning is tough. In the creative world, a blank canvas is the most intimidating thing we face … and a social media calendar feels like 260 blank canvases.

But wait—there is good news! You don’t have to (and you shouldn’t) start with a blank canvas. You actually have a third of your content already planned (and you probably didn’t even realize it.)

Now I have you asking the important questions— “Where?” and “How?” Let’s answer “How?”  first:

We’ve adopted a three-column approach to planning.  To follow this approach, simply create a planning document with three columns and give them these headings:

  1. The World
  2. The Bank
  3. The Day

Odd titles? Maybe, but they’ll make sense in a bit.

The World

The World has already dictated a ton of your content. This portion primarily addresses official holidays and other noteworthy days. It’s everything from Christmas to Veterans Day to International Sandwich Day. One of the biggest pitfalls is letting these days sneak up on you. We’ve all forgotten an obvious holiday, but it’s avoidable with our three-column system.

None of these World events move more than a few days year-to-year, so you already know when they’re going to happen. The first step is filling out this column.  Start with the days your bank will be closed. Craft those messages in advance, build the posts, and save them. If you don’t have time to do the whole year now, set calendar alerts two or three weeks ahead to allow yourself time to build the posts.

Next, list all the other non-bank holidays and “national” days you want to commemorate. Not all of these events will resonate with your brand and its culture. We recommend paying close attention to the following:

In addition to the more relevant holidays, there are several fun days, like Pi Day (March 14), named after the number used in circular equations (3.14). There’s Star Wars Day (May the Fourth Be With You) and a ton of other fun days that can help anchor your calendar with ready-made ideas.

Whether or not you can create all of the content to support these days, there’s a day for everyone. Go ahead and mark these on your calendar.

The Bank

The second pitfall we see is only using these noteworthy World days. It’s a tempting pitfall because it’s so easy—but all this approach accomplishes is adding another drop into the sea of sameness. Change your questioning from, “How can my bank participate?” to “What can my bank add to the conversation?”

a group of very similar halloween social media posts.
Our bank-focused social media feed was inundated with this image or images like it during the holidays. When we looked at popular stock-art sites, lo and behold, this was one of the first images on the page. This is what we mean by “the sea of sameness.”

To fill out your calendar less blandly, we must look at the items your bank creates—specifically, those you know about in advance. We know a lot of things seem last-minute when it comes to bank marketing, but more often than not, this happens because you’re busy and planned events creep up on you.

I’m talking:

You know about these events in advance, and it’s vital to maintaining your sanity that you pre-plan social media for them. Since most of you will be pulling double (or triple) duty in promoting and running these events, do yourself a favor and have some of the social media work done before each big day.

Be diligent about adding these to your schedule, or they’ll sneak up on you like President’s Day.

Go ahead and work out the copy and graphics to have these ready. Pre-promote these events in advance. And be sure to follow up afterwards, reporting such results as turnout numbers, funds raised, and total volunteer hours.

And, of course, post pictures from the day of the event—which brings us to our last column.

The Day

As you might’ve surmised, the other two columns are about freeing up time for reporting the news—your news—as it happens. All of your postings cannot be conceived, produced, written, designed, proofed, and reviewed by compliance in one day.

There are plenty of fun and/or interesting things that happen at your bank each day. But they’re easy to miss when you’re researching the difference between Veterans Day and Memorial Day for what seems like the 60th time to make sure Monday’s post is correct.

Preplanning posts around official holidays and bank-created events is the only way to free up the time necessary to find the interesting things in day-to-day life. But these day-to-day stories are the ones that set your bank apart, because they’re what actually make your bank different—the people, the relationships, and the level of service.

Maybe it’s Mr. Jones, who always visits the drive-thru with his loyal golden retriever, or the kids showing up from Mrs. Smith’s second-grade class to learn about money. Maybe it’s Darryl from IT who volunteers every weekend, or Tammy, who’s been bringing donuts on Fridays since she started at the bank in 2003.

A lot of people struggle to post these details because they seem mundane—but really, they only seem that way to you because they represent your daily experience. Just because you’ve seen Mr. Jones’ dog 100 times doesn’t mean your social followers have.

To plan well and free up the time you need to create these day-of stories, you’re going to need some tools.

The Where

After filling out your three planning columns, what do you do with all of this information? Whether you want to stick to planning the work or make the content in advance and automate the posting, you’ll need some tools.

If you’re going the pure planning route, I suggest Airtable. It’s a great platform with a ton of flexibility that lets you look at the same information in many views. You can convert your content list to a calendar view with a click of a button. For all you project managers, you can also use a Kanban view to push a project through stages, such as design, proofing, and compliance review. The best part: Airtable is free for the core functionality, and the free version should cover almost all your needs.

Airtable is especially handy for collaborating with people across multiple locations. You could use Excel, but emailing one file around gets cumbersome and dangerous, as it can change with each hand through which it passes.

When you’re ready to start scheduling posts, we recommend starting with HootSuite because it’s the gold standard for starting out in this activity and also offers a free plan (i.e., three accounts and 30 scheduled messages with one user, as of the publication of this column). This approach lets you get your feet wet without too much of a commitment. If you don’t like HootSuite, Buffer also has a free plan, and Sendible has affordable plans that include some more robust features we enjoy.

Or, if all of this is totally overwhelming, you can jump into a truly managed experience with Social Assurance. It’s a fantastic company that specializes in helping banks run their social media at many levels.

Plan, Plan, Plan

While the need to plan might not be a groundbreaking insight, we have seen the three-column categorization really help planners put their calendars into perspective. Not being overwhelmed or missing opportunities is all about breaking down the year into smaller bites.

Start with big holidays. Then overlay your bank’s event calendar. Once your social calendar is two-thirds full, you will find it much easier to identify and post the interesting day-to-day activities that set your bank apart.

Just because we’re not hearing about big data every day doesn’t mean it was a fad. Its importance has faded exactly as much as that of social media or millennials—which is to say, not at all.

The only problem is that a lot of bank marketers still feel too small to take on big data—because big data is a hell of an undertaking.

But not all data projects have to be big. You can start small.

brain made of connect-the-dots

We’re going to give you four small bites you can take out of your bank’s big data that will yield obvious results. They’re actionable items anyone can handle without having to bring an extra data person on staff or enlist a third-party vendor.

And while each piece of data is important on its own, when compared with one another, these data points can feel like cheat codes.

Even better, these data points can easily help you spend your marketing budget on much more targeted efforts.

If you already have a handle on these data points, great. You’re a lot further along than a lot of your peers. And if you don’t, that’s fine, too. But in that case, it’s time to get started—and we’re going to help.

person looking at user icons with magnifying glass

1.  How many clients do you actually have?

If you don’t know, you’re not alone. It’s a statistic so obvious that it’s often overlooked. But knowing the number of total clients your bank serves fills in a huge piece of the puzzle for your bank, your budget, and your marketing strategy.

If you’re ever in a room where this question is asked, you have to be the one to answer it.

Conventional wisdom says more is more when it comes to attracting new clients. New accounts mean new deposits, new loans, and so on—and that’s true. But it’s not the whole truth. Deepening relationships with existing clients by suggesting additional (and helpful) bank products, providing financial education, and encouraging engagement with your bank can cement customer loyalty and increase wallet share.

Tackling data-driven marketing is like eating an elephant. It seems overwhelming at the outset, but the only way to do it is one bite at a time. That’s why most banks simply don’t make the effort. Knowing your total number of clients amounts to taking the first bite.

person thinking about shapes

2.  What accounts can customers open with your bank?

Can you list each account category and product your bank offers, complete with a brief description? Sure, you have access to the information, but do you know the products off the top of your head?

You offer personal checking, but how many different types of accounts? And I’m not just talking about the ones you’re currently promoting. Can you name all the checking accounts that are holdovers from mergers? What about each offering in your treasury management suite?

This can be a lot of information to grasp. But failing to grasp it is a big mistake we see banks make. If you lack a fundamental understanding of what products your clients have with your bank, it will be impossible to market to them in any effective way. If you take a more analytical approach to this data point, you can find gaps in the products and services you offer. Maybe something is missing in your product line that your clients would like to see, or perhaps it’s time to retire that holiday savings account that no one uses.

Additionally, banks that have gone through mergers can have an overwhelming number of account types. And chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve gone through a merger. (According to the FDIC, 91% of merger participants are community banks, and community banks make up 92% of all institutions.) This means that most banks are offering duplicate accounts, or similar accounts with different levels of profitability.

Community banks are often unwilling to upset the apple cart. You have an opportunity here. Look at those accounts to find which ones are more profitable.

hand moving game pieces around a board

3.  How many clients are coming into the branch?

If you can understand how people are originating business with your bank (i.e., how many clients are opening accounts in branch versus online or on mobile?), you can focus on optimizing the experience for each of your clients.

This also helps you set realistic goals for your campaigns and better track your results. If you want to increase online account openings, it’s good to know how many people are opening accounts online currently.

Knowing this will also help you understand whether you’re simply spending marketing dollars to cannibalize the clients you were already getting. If your online account openings go up, but your in-branch numbers drop by a comparable amount, you may just be moving clients instead of attracting new ones.

Listen to your clients, and speak to them in the marketing channels where they are more attuned to hear from you. Otherwise, you might be tossing your marketing dollars into the void.

person looking at a bar chart on a computer

4.  How are your individual web pages performing?

Take a deep dive into your website’s analytics to follow the different paths that your clients are taking. The first thing you’ll probably notice is that the overwhelming majority of your traffic is logging into your online banking portal.

Where are these clients entering? Where are they exiting? What are they trying to gain from your site? If you see an upward trend of visitors to a product page, be sure that page clearly explains the product’s benefits (as opposed to providing nothing more than dry bank jargon with rates and fees).

How users navigate your website can tell you a lot about what you’re doing well and what you’re not. Understanding this navigation creates an opportunity to fine-tune your highest performing pages—and to find ways to keep users engaged on the pages they’re currently leaving.

Four ways to combine the data you’ve gathered for quick wins.

As obvious as these data points may seem, now that you have them collected (and hopefully top of mind), you can combine them to return results that are far greater than the sum of their parts.

1. Heavy Is the Relationship That Holds the Checking Account.

Let’s start simply. How many customers do you have, and how many checking account customers do you have?

A Bankrate survey shows the average American holds onto a checking account for almost 16 years. Think of all the other bank products a client will need over the course of 16 years. The bank that holds a client’s checking account is likely to be top of mind when that client seeks new services.

You should have all of your clients’ mailing and email addresses. So send out a special promotion to your bank’s clients who don’t already have an active checking account.

2. The Savings Gap Is Larger than You Think.

Similarly, you can compare your clients who have checking accounts with those who have savings accounts. Then advertise a special promotion to those who don’t have a checking account with your bank. You may even be able to set those clients up with automatic monthly transfers to the savings accounts.

3. Who’s Ready for a HELOC?

A HELOC has one basic universal requirement—a home with a decent amount of equity. Do you know who has a list of most of your customers who meet that requirement and are already acquainted with your bank? Your mortgage department.

4. Use Traffic to Generate Online Account Openings.

How many of your top 15 web pages have online-account-opening prompts? If your answer is “fewer than 15,” you have an opportunity. Your top-performing pages, especially if they advertise an account that can be opened online, must prompt visitors to open a new account.

Better Data Should Equal Better Service

You have an opportunity to make the banking experience better for your clients. The more you know about them, the more you can provide them with the services they need to grow and protect their money. And the great thing about banking is that client success often directly correlates with institutional success.

The good news is that your bank probably already has lots of data on each client. You just have to figure out how you want to use it.

Don’t feel overwhelmed by the prospect of starting all at once. Work your way through this list, and then you’ll begin to understand how to use the data you have to suit your bank’s specific needs.

Before you know it, your easy wins will turn to big wins, and your clients will be better for it.

BONUS: What’s the abandonment rate of your online application?

Now that you’ve got some easy wins under your belt, here’s a bonus data point that’s a little trickier, but still very doable for most bank marketers.

It’s time to find out how many prospects drop out during the middle of an online application—and to figure out why they’re dropping out.

Some of you may not have an online application to drop out of. That doesn’t mean you get to skip this step. EVERY bank should have an online application. (If you aren’t convinced, read Josh Mabus’ article on digital adoption, Dive Into the Digital Deep End. If you don’t have online and mobile account opening, your homework is to make that happen.)

By the time a potential client begins filling out an online application, you’ve already got him or her—hook, line, and sinker. If the prospect drops out during the application process, it’s because you’re doing something wrong.

Your goal should be to make the path to purchase as short and seamless as possible. In spite of this, opening an account online can often take more than 15 minutes. Because today’s digital-first consumer won’t settle for anything less than simple and streamlined, abandonment rates for online applications are staggeringly high—upwards of 40%. And 34% of consumers reported they would have gone elsewhere if they’d known in advance how hard/long the online account opening process would be, according to a study from Deloitte.

However, if you know where in the process these prospects are dropping out, you’ll have a better understanding of why—and can adjust your application accordingly to drive more conversions.

Content Creation Is a Struggle

I’m guessing you found this post because you Googled something like “How to create content for banks,” probably because you’re a content creator like me, and probably because you’re looking for a boost to reach that next cutting-edge idea. You’ve been staring down the business end of a word processor to no avail. Just that nagging cursor and a deadline that’s either around the corner or just went by. 

stack of browsers windows with pencil flag

You’re not alone. Even the greatest storytellers and most engaging brands struggle to produce meaningful, valuable content. 

Higher-ups hear the word “content” at a conference and expect the marketing department to publish three pieces of “original content” each week. We respond to those expectations with arbitrary deadlines. We forget to set an intention. We forget why we’re writing in the first place. We forget our names. We turn to Facebook for a reminder and get sucked into meaningless top 10 lists produced by other banks. It’s the circle of life. 

Why are we writing? 

Those don’t seem like inspiring goals. They definitely don’t give us new ideas of what to write about. 

Yellow squiggly line

Set Your Intention

You need to have a driving goal to inform your content strategy. Posting blindly to your blog or social media platforms is a sure-fire way to leave your readers uninterested and guarantee your own burnout. 

What do you want to achieve with your content?

Once you’ve set a few intentions for your content, you can think of each intention as a bucket and begin filling it with ideas. 

Now you just have to start creating it. Or do you?

squiggly line

Content Isn’t Created

We struggle the most when we’re trying to create something from nothing.

Calling ourselves content creators is setting unrealistic expectations. We are, at our best, content curators. 

No one is asking you to go full DaVinci Code—tying archaeology, religion, art, history and Crusades-era politics into a riveting narrative. They’ve got Dan Brown and other authors like him for that. They’re coming to you, likely, because they’re a client of your bank, or because they are looking for more information about how to improve themselves and the financial well-being of their clients. You don’t have to create something from scratch, you just have to find the things your clients are looking for and make it available to them.

This may mean gathering facts about personal credit scores or walking entrepreneurs through the process of getting a new business loan. 

It may mean providing existing clients with light-hearted breaks from their day by sharing something funny or promoting your employees’ community involvement efforts. 

It definitely means sharing the success stories of the people and businesses your bank works with on a daily basis.

Look around you for the stories that already exist, and curate them through your website. 

Yellow squiggly line

Teach Your Clients

One of the biggest blank spots in financial content is simply explaining banking products—helping consumers connect the dots. We know so much about banking that we forget to tell others who don’t share our banking-is-our-universe perspectives.

Planting your flag as a financial expert is a great place to start. 

Every week, it seems a new study or survey comes out proving again how frustrated Americans are when it comes to finances.

For example, a recent National Endowment for Financial Education survey showed only 24 percent of millennials demonstrated a basic understanding of how to manage their money. Another SunTrust Bank survey of people in relationships revealed money is the leading cause of relationship stress. 

As banks, our job is to help educate our clients on the ins and outs of finances. After all, we’re the ones employing the majority of financial experts. 

Your job, as a content curator, is to identify the areas where your clients are struggling and seek out the experts in each area. Have them produce how-to pieces, or simply interview them and do the writing yourself. 

Helping your clients grow their understanding of finances is not just a gesture of noble intention—it generates goodwill from potential clients and can be a boon to your website’s SEO efforts.

squiggly line

Enlist Outside Help

You don’t need to go it alone. 

Find the people in your bank who know the most about the topics you want to cover, and enlist their help. No one wants to write a weekly column for your bank’s website, but if every expert writes something about their field once each year, you’ll have generated a year’s worth of rich, engaging content that meets the needs of your clients.

Since your in-office colleagues tend to know their clients and communities better than anyone else, they’ll know the success stories, too. Don’t think of yourself as a writer stranded on an island. Think of yourself as a museum curator, looking for the best stories to share with the public. 

Finally, be sure to look outside your company for partners in the community.

These takeaways will make or break your bank’s geotargeting investment.

Geotargeting and geofencing are two of the trendiest advertising activities enabled by the mobile revolution. More than that, they’re proving to be the next big thing on the advertising frontier. Understandably so—marketers move their dollars to where people spend most of their time. And today’s U.S. consumers spend at least five hours of their day on their mobile devices.

phone with 3d map and geo targeting points

But both these activities come with inherent flaws. And they require a new level of analytical and creative rigor not yet fully understood.

That said, we’ve seen a number of banks make substantial use of geolocation to improve customer targeting—and that has yielded a wealth of lessons learned. Here are a few of our biggest takeaways.

dotted line on 3d map

1. Advertise where people are sedentary, on their phone, AND often managing their money.

Banks have long looked at major retail areas as the prime real estate for financial decisions. However, a bank’s physical presence at a mall doesn’t necessarily mirror decision-making in a digital advertising medium. People shopping at malls are busy and although they may check their devices, they aren’t making important banking decisions when buying a new pair of shoes or a cinnamon bun.

Don’t waste your digital dollars where people are active or using their phones for more intentional reasons. A better use of your geotargeting investment could be placement around pickup lines at school or large office buildings full of daytime workers. These individuals are stationary and often browsing their phones more casually. This is an opportunity for you to generate meaningful interest.

2. It’s not just about location, it’s about timing, too.

Think about those carpool lines at the elementary school. Don’t spend your money for a full day of advertising. Test time ranges between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. and 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. Consider the day of the week or the time of year when targeting those employees in the office building. Fridays, plus the 15th and 30th of each month are common paydays—when money is top of mind—and a great time to start a conversation about banking.

3. It’s not just about location and timing, it’s also about creative and messaging.

To properly target by location and timing, your creative and messaging should align with your placement. For example, you could remind those office building employees on payday that they can put a little money from their paychecks into one of your high-yield savings accounts. This is a timely, meaningful message. Anything else would be “just another bank ad” and quickly dismissed.

Keep in mind that your landing pages from these ads should also align with the creative and messaging. Don’t send these interested savers to your homepage. Send them to a page that shows how far a little saving can go. And allow them to take action there on the page to set up a consultation, send themselves a reminder, or open a new savings account on the spot.

path through 3d map

4. “Geoconquesting” is a good idea, but not a silver bullet.

People go into banks most often for one of three reasons:

All of these events represent an opportunity for you. But when geoconquesting—that is, a form of geotargeting that focuses on your competitors’ locations—you should temper your expectations. By the time a consumer enters a branch, many of the choices that go into opening a new account have already been researched. And your offer may not be strong enough to pull someone away from a decision.

It may sound like a promising opportunity to target a customer who’s in the act of closing an account. Keep in mind, though, these customers have often opened a new account at another bank many months before officially closing their old account. Again, your offer may not impact the decision.

Geoconquesting does offer a strong awareness opportunity, however.

Staying top-of-mind is difficult, and switching banks is rare. Meaningful, brand-boosting advertising will keep your bank fresh in a customer’s mind when they have any issues with a competitor or they decide they want to look elsewhere for another financial solution. To help solidify your brand, weave your bank’s story—and how you serve the greater community—into your more informational ads.

5. Reinforce sponsorships where you can.

Geotargeting local events where you have a presence can significantly enhance your success. If you’re a branded sponsor of the Fifth Annual Local Art Crawl, overlay the area with ads and drive visitors to your booth. Use the event’s topic to your benefit. If you have a presence at a business event, use the ads to highlight some of the other businesses you’ve helped. If it is a local arts fair, try raffling a local art piece at your booth and use the ads to promote it. Traffic will follow.

Don’t let your advertising end when you pack up your booth. Retarget the customers who have clicked on the landing page you use for the event. This can help you deliver relevant advertising to your booth visitors for months to come, moving them from casually interested to new client.

The data is there, but you can’t get your arms around it.

Oh, data. You are so big. So bright. So beautiful. But like a perfectly curated Instagram post that is filtered to perfection, you often feel unattainable.

As with content, starting to develop a strategic approach to data mining, transformation, and analysis requires support across the organization and commitment to the activity over the long run. Also as with content, there are ways to earn “quick wins” — in this case, connecting a few systems as you expand your data aggregation to include more and more information over time.

Demographic data is often the first step. Ensuring you have an accurate understanding of the basic traits of your customers is baseline. This often comes from your core system, but can also be augmented by other platforms like online/mobile banking and rewards or loyalty platforms. Behavioral data is the hardest to build, but the most powerful by far. This data comes to life by combining email automation systems, website analytics, social media metrics, mobile and online banking behaviors, and transactional data.

The key? Start small. One system connected to another. One focused insight tested.

Discover who has used your mobile app in the past 45 days. Those are your true mobile customers. Determine the top three channels customers use (or doesn’t use) and inform them of alternatives. Uncover a customer’s best email by assigning a scoring system based on engagement with their multiple emails that often live across different systems within your bank.

It’s a long road. A commitment. But the insights you glean will inform your marketing, product decisions, and investments in customer experience for years to come.

Intimidated by all that data? Work with an agency that has experience marrying multiple data streams into one actionable strategy.

I’ve seen a lot of large media companies and corporations whining about ad blockers lately. As a marketer, I’m expected to be the anti-ad blocker — the guy who creates a new scheme to overcome the technological defenses that protect our eyes from the incursion of epilepsy-inducing ads.

bouncers blocking normal guy


The truth is, I have to disable my own ad blocker to read a Wired story just like everyone else.
I use Wired as an example because they got out front of ad blocking earlier this year, publishing the number of their readers who block their ads (20 percent at the time) and explaining how they pay for content. Wired told users they would have to either pay for the content themselves (and offered a very minimal weekly fee for an ad-free experience) or stop restricting ads when viewing Wired content. Now Wired visitors can’t view content until their ad blocker is disabled, which feels like a very reasonable (free) paywall to me.


Ad blockers claim to streamline your web experience. They stop clunky ads from loading and help maintain distraction-free browsing. They restrict inappropriate or harmful ads, and they keep pesky trackers from selling your browsing habits to third parties.


At least that’s the story ad blockers are telling us.


Ad blockers aren’t evil — they’re just telling a better story than the ads they’re blocking, and it’s making advertisers sweat.


Wired ran the first banner ad 22 years ago, and now they’re embracing a model that often means getting rid of their own invention.


Many advertisers, scorned by ad blockers, are running to social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat where ads can’t be blocked. This reckless refusal to listen to the consumer will undoubtedly lead to the new platforms adopting blockers of their own. Facebook is already cracking down on how advertisers use Facebook in an effort to preserve the clear story a user’s timeline tells them.


The two types of prominent ad blockers on the market speak clearly to the issues consumers have with online advertising. The first category is the nonprofit blocker that restricts anything the user hasn’t agreed to view and is especially vigilant against trackers (the technology that show you athletic clothing ads after you visit Nike’s website).


The second type of ad blocker is a business that offers a paid service promising to block ads on pages that have heinous ads, poorly placed ads or an overall abundance of ads. Some of these businesses work with advertisers to find a happy medium — a pleasant online advertising experience.


Honestly, with an ad blocker, I still see some great paid content. Adblock Plus gives permission to advertisements that meet certain guidelines, like placement and size. I think of the company like a consumer-supported Federal Communications Commission (FCC) — listening to the outrage of the consumer and developing a solution everyone can agree on.


And what is the reaction to these rare ads that make it through an ad blocking software?


Users don’t react with anger but are instead happy to see a respectful ad.


In fact, the ad blocking users, who are said to be tech savvy, young and attractive to advertisers, are very attentive and responsive when the ads display at a low volume and with some amount of relevance to their lives.


Before we go much further, there’s a question we should ask ourselves: “Why do we accept it as ‘natural’ that someone would want to skip an ad?”


The reasoning partially lies in the fact that we now know we’re being advertised to and that affects our desire for free will. We view ads as an interruption when we used to view them as informative. Gone are the days where we’re excited to learn about a new product.


At the root of this change is the degeneration of ads. We listened to “the message is the medium” too much.


“If I’m on TV, I’m good!”


There were advertisers who didn’t consider the fact they were running poor quality, locally produced ads as a detriment. They were on TV!


“If I’m on TV, I’m good!” became “If I’m on the Internet, I’m good!”


Then it was all about getting attention. Animated ads flashed “lower your interest rate” and “lose weight now!” If you could shoot the alien, you’d get a free sample!


Medium and technique surpassed strategy, and storytelling, and consumers rejected the bad ads — just as they have on TV and every medium before.


Old Spice got ahead of the game in 2010 by making commercials so funny that consumers went straight to their website with the express purpose of watching advertising.


Geico recently produced a series of hilarious pre-roll commercials that tell consumers they scripted an ad so short they had to keep the camera running in order to fill the minimum ad buy. They made their attempts at advertising the butt of the joke. You can’t skip their ads because they’re already over.
On a more serious note, Dodge’s 2013 God Made a Farmer ad struck such a chord that 20 million people were compelled to seek out the ad to watch it again (and again).


Budweiser’s anti-drunk-driving ad hasn’t seen quite as many views yet but tugs a similar heartstring by using a sweet dog to urge young, single adults to drink responsibly.


These are ad campaigns that are sought out.


They are the Holy Grail of advertising.


They also share something in common: sound strategy and strong storytelling.


Ad blockers aren’t going to ruin online advertising, but poor storytelling will. We can’t continue to throw money at bad storytelling and hope consumers will respond positively.


Each time you publish irrelevant, obnoxious or tone deaf content, you are giving up an amount of the customer’s trust — not only for your brand but for the platform in which you publish.


How can you make a customer’s life better? Geico points directly to the fact they are making the shortest commercials they can. Old Spice is trying to make the consumer laugh. Dodge is playing on the sentimentality of the American spirit. Budweiser is offering a public service through love for our pets.
Ad blockers are what we deserve for placing thousands of obnoxious flashing ads for the last two decades. I’m surprised ad blockers weren’t more common 10 years ago when every ad congratulated me on being the 1,000,000th visitor and offered me a cash prize.


We discovered flashing text, animation, spyware and the thousands of other possibilities and acted like children in an unsupervised candy shop.


Now that the consumer has recovered control of their online experience, it’s our job to win back their trust with better storytelling. It’s our job to place appropriate ads in appropriate places and treat online advertising with the same respect we’ve treated print.


If we want consumers to less aggressively oppose advertising and be less suspicious of our motives, we must offer them an actual benefit and stop begging for their time and attention.


We must earn it.