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.
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?
To boost SEO?
To fill our web page?
To have something to share on social media?
Those don’t seem like inspiring goals. They definitely don’t give us new ideas of what to write about.
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?
Make your clients happier?
Encourage community involvement?
Increase financial literacy?
Promote deposit growth?
Attract a certain type of business owner?
A little bit of everything?
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?
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.
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.
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.
“We only advertise mortgages in the second quarter.”
“Why?”
“People don’t buy houses in the winter.”
I don’t think all bankers believe this, but I’ve certainly heard it enough to do the research.
Survey says? There’s something to it.
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, spring and early summer consistently boast the highest number of new home sales.
Don’t believe the U.S. Census Bureau? That’s OK, some people don’t. Here’s the National Association of Realtors existing home sales data from 2017.
Even with two graphs, you don’t see the whole picture. Dig a little deeper, and another story emerges—mortgage lenders who limit advertising during an idealized four-month window miss out on the vast majority of home sales.
More Homes Are Sold Outside the Spring Window
In 2017, more new, single-family homes were sold between March 1 and June 30 than during any other four-month period. That’s a large chunk of business but, in reality, March-June sales add up to barely more than one-third of the 608,000 sales made during 2017.
You see, every month last year, people collectively bought at least 43,000 new homes and 315,000 existing homes.
There’s no way around the numbers. In fact, according to my data, people have bought houses every month for the past eight years. The only reason I say eight years is because I didn’t pull older data. I figure eight years makes a strong enough point. The crazy thing is, during each of those months, people bought almost as many houses they did during any other month.
Here’s my point:
People buy homes all year long. Ignoring this fact when developing your marketing strategy can cost you significant revenue.
Limiting yourself to springtime advertising definitely gives you a shot at snagging some business during the industry’s busiest season, but not advertising during the other seasons will cost you much more. It will cost you more than half of the year’s home sales.
Un-Level the Playing Field
Before we go any further, let’s establish one key point:
The goal of advertising is to make your business stand apart from competitors.
If every mortgage provider in your market saturates a particular four-month advertising window, you’re all competing in an overcrowded marketplace for a limited number of eyes.
But, if most of your competitors have pulled their advertising campaigns by the end of June, you’ll have an empty stage and a captive audience.
When marketing mortgages, or any other parity product, you must pounce anytime the playing field is uneven.
You could be one of many lenders trying to close loans for the 61,000 in the spring, or you could be the only lender closing 43,000 loans in December.
Which scenario sounds more profitable to you?
Grow Brand Identity in Your Marketplace
Imagine getting a call for a favor from an old friend to whom you haven’t talked since the last time you helped him. Then another friend, who bought you lunch last week, asks you to help her, too. Who are you going to help first?
To the latter you may say, “Sure, just tell me when and where,” and to the former, “Nice to hear from you; where have you been all year?”
Coke, Walmart and Apple are top of mind because their advertising is pervasive. It’s why most of us think about them at some point every day—whether we want to or not.
Financial marketing is difficult because regulations won’t let us budge on the “fact,” so we have to find other ways to stand out.
You’d be surprised how often I hear people say, “Oh yeah, I think I’ve heard of that lender. Is it the green one or the blue one?”
Even if your marketplace completely dries up during the winter, I’d still recommend running some degree of “awareness” ads throughout the entire year. The best way to make sure a customer calls you when they’re ready to buy a home, instead of your competition, is to make sure you’re top of mind. You certainly don’t need to be obnoxious (though some studies show that works, too), but you need to be known.
So when other mortgage lenders enter their hibernation caves in July, consider ramping up your awareness efforts. These efforts will certainly translate into business during the fall and winter, but more importantly, it means your business will be top of mind come next March.
Drive Sales All Year Long
Simply put, refusing to advertise outside the spring window is refusing business. Maintaining a consistent marketing and advertising strategy that covers the entire year—rather than just four months—lets you invest consistently in your business and boost cash flow.
In the spring, you might imply your willingness to work faster than the competition. Then, in winter, you can encourage buyers to act while home prices are lower.
Do you want to be a little fish in a big pond, or do you want to be the only fish?
At Mabus Agency, we tell our clients to zig when others zag, but this is a case of zigging while everyone else stands still. If you want to increase loan volume and stand out from the competition, buck the trend and do something different this fall.
How We Support the Best Bank in the South
Money.com named Renasant Bank as one of the eight best banks in the country this week—specifically, the best bank in the South. This only confirms something we’ve known for a decade because we work alongside the bank daily.
So how do we support the best? By being the best. That’s not bragging. We know we’re not solely responsible for Renasant’s explosive growth. But it is a response to an unstated challenge. Iron sharpens iron, as they say, and Mabus Agency had to be better every day to keep pace with Renasant Bank.
We like to think our commitment to daily improvement and work marketing the bank has helped with its growth and notoriety. In fact, here are the six most important ways we’ve supported Renasant—the best bank in the South.
Solidify Brand
Banks were in a tough spot when Mabus Agency began its relationship with Renasant Bank in 2008. At that time, “bank” was unfairly deemed a bad word—generally due to the misconduct of a few bad practitioners. The average consumer was scared, and distrust of financial institutions was at an all-time high.
Renasant Bank spent more than a century building a reputation as an honest bank that operated safely and in the customer’s best interest. That mandate had not changed in 2008, but the actions of other banks forced Renasant to take another look at its tagline “More Than a Bank.”
A phrase that embodied the bank’s commitment to offering comprehensive service had become inadvertently associated with the practices of banks that had expanded services to an unhealthy degree.
So Renasant Bank decided the time was right to make a move. It enlisted the brand experts at Mabus Agency to help find a new path.
After Mabus Agency recognized the bank’s helpful staff and culture of community service as its key benefit, Renasant rolled out “Move to Greater Service” as a pivot away from its previous tag. This straightforward message was easy to understand while utilizing a unique call to action. The new tag was shortened to “Greater Service” as customers and employees alike adopted the rallying cry.
That move to greater service allowed us to see something we’d initially overlooked. The service offered by Renasant’s associates came from a place of greater understanding. As the brand grew in footprint and market share, Mabus Agency recommended doubling down on the service-oriented image with a more permanent tagline, “Understanding You.”
Strategy, Strategy, Strategy
Many banks make the mistake of tackling marketing a la carte. This branch needs to buy a yearbook ad, while that magazine claims all the other banks are buying ads in it. This type of marketing is reactionary. It’ll never get you ahead because you’ll always be reacting to someone else.
At Renasant Bank, every marketing decision is driven by a central strategy. Before approving any new ad request or new marketing campaign, we ask the question, “How can this fit into our overall strategy?”
This doesn’t mean we say no to one-off program ads or Chamber of Commerce magazines. With a central strategy in place, there’s no longer such a thing as a one-off ad because every ad drives the brand’s narrative.
Communicate the Benefit
Bank marketing so often rests on nothing more than puns (How many “Bank on us!” ads have you seen?), tired sayings, or rate announcements. And sure, a truly great rate can carry an ad from time to time—Renasant advertised a checking account rate that was higher than the majority of others within its footprint this year—but the key is showing clients how your product or service makes their life better.
When we develop new campaigns for Renasant, we start with the benefit and actually ask the question out loud. “How is this product actually going to make a client’s life easier?” To the Renasant team’s credit, they develop their products with the same thought in mind.
With the greatest benefit identified, we build a campaign around communicating that benefit as clearly as possible.
Not all advertising has to be clever. It just has to be clear.
Teach the Customer
The average clients don’t understand their role in a banking relationship. And they shouldn’t have to. It’s not their job to learn how to be your clients, it’s your job to teach them to be better at navigating the world of finance.
We helped Renasant Bank launch a content platform, Renasant Nation, to share a combination of helpful and entertaining content. Clients can watch “Building Us,” a show about a family renovating its home, or learn how to use a HELOC to get the money they need for their own renovations.
The “Crafted” series features entrepreneurs with innovative businesses all throughout the Southeast. Helpful explainer videos accompany the series, showing viewers how to take out a business loan or make the most of their cash-flow management tools.
Helping clients become better with their money not only builds loyalty, it levels the quality of your client base.
Be Different
Banking is a parity industry. No one wants to admit that products are similar from bank to bank, but the truth is that regulations don’t allow for much variation. But nothing is stopping banks from looking or acting differently.
Starting with its name, Renasant Bank is certainly different than any other bank. It isn’t the First Community Bank of anything. It owns its name and, in turn, its identity.
And when it comes to creative execution, Renasant’s leadership lets us run pretty wild with ideas. It isn’t scared to chase an idea to its conclusion before deciding one way or the other. Sometimes we get to the end and know it won’t make it past compliance. Other times we walk away with a wildly successful campaign idea.
We license weird songs that we know will stick in people’s heads for days. We continually evolve Renasant’s image while remaining true to its core brand and strategy.
Renasant Bank isn’t scared to be different, because its marketing team and leadership know being different is the only way to stand apart from the competition.
Speak Boldly and Back It Up
Along with an eagerness to stand out, Renasant’s leaders aren’t scared to plant a flag or stake a claim.
The bank’s entire culture is built around ensuring positive client experiences and making an impact within the communities it serves. So when it came time to expand the company’s brand in 2015, we said we wanted to make a bold claim: “We understand.”
In short, we wanted our messaging to mean something—to demonstrate a human understanding of client needs while promoting the array of products and services Renasant offers.
This tagline seems simple on the surface, but it actually creates a pretty high bar for each Renasant associate. Luckily, it’s a bar the associates were accustomed to surpassing.
Does Your Bank Have What It Takes to Be the Best?
Does your bank offer exceptional service to clients, but struggles with the best way to communicate your message? Do you have a killer team of associates in place, but don’t see new traffic come through your door to meet them? Let us meet with your marketing team and show you how we can support and grow your bank.
What makes a bank the best? Time magazine’s Money.com published a list of the best banks in each region, and the list is pretty short—eight to be exact.
Renasant Bank—named the best bank in the South—was one, and we were especially excited because it’s our longest-tenured client.
Since Mabus Agency works with Renasant Bank every day, we know what makes it successful, but we were curious. Were Renasant’s habits unique? It turns out these banks all have a few things in common, and we believe these similarities contributed to their place at the top, and could help your bank, too.
Here are the banks that took the prize in each region. Congratulations to each!
Pacific – Banner Bank
Mountain West – Washington Federal Bank
Midwest – First National Bank of Omaha
Great Lakes – Huntington Bank
Mid-Atlantic – Northwest Bank
New England – NBT
South – Renasant Bank
Texas – Frost Bank
If you’re looking to improve your offerings, make sure you can check the box next to these industry-leading factors. We can’t guarantee you’ll be the best bank in your region, but we can guarantee you’ll be a better bank. And your clients will appreciate that.
1. Benefit-Forward Products
Whether it’s Banner Bank’s time-saving bill-pay dashboard, First National Bank of Omaha’s free checking, or Renasant Bank’s ATM fee refunds, most of the banks on this list make their benefits clear. When advertising products, these banks let clients know what’s in it for them up front instead of relying on vague descriptions. Here are a few product descriptions for the best banks:
“Free means free. And that means no hidden monthly fees…”
“Get the checking account that gives you cell phone insurance, roadside assistance, ATM fee refunds…”
“Simplify how your business manages its cash flow with our secure online portal.”
In many cases, banks exhibit FOMO (fear of missing out) and list everything that might bring interest. The banks on this list had the bravery to bring the key benefits to the front.
2. Client-Focused Products
Great benefits come from great accounts. It’s difficult to truly differentiate product offerings from those of other institutions. These banks found nuanced ways to improve products with a focus on client needs.
Most of the banks on this list offer simple, up-front accounts with some combination of no account minimums, service fees, or ATM fees.
But it doesn’t stop with these entry-level products. These banks offer comprehensive upgrade paths that provide impactful interest rates, exceptional technology, and convenient features.
If you want to join the list of best banks, find ways to move from the commoditized field of other banks.
3. Easy-to-Access Digital Banking
Most bank clients live a large portion of their lives online, whether they simply dabble in social media or order all their groceries from Amazon. Banks have taken far too long to adapt to the public’s move toward digital. It’s 2018 and too many banks still have hard-to-find and impossible-to-navigate online banking portals.
Your clients have the entire world at their fingertips. They can order almost anything at almost any time. And they’re comparing their other experiences on the World Wide Web to their experience with your website and online banking.
Each bank on Money.com’s best-in-the-region list provides easy access to its client portals, online account opening tools, and mobile banking services through its website home page.
4. Actual Customer Service
It’s no surprise that many of the award-winning banks have been recognized for superior customer service in recent years. Banner Bank, First National Bank of Omaha, Huntington Bank, Northwest Bank, and Frost Bank were all ranked at or near the top of their region for customer service according to J.D. Power.
Those banks not explicitly rated by J.D. Power make it clear that their associates are ready and willing to address any concerns with easy-to-find contact pages, eager call center staff, and even feedback forms on some sites.
Most banks tout their customer service, but it’s easier said than done. To truly differentiate, you have to live up to those promises of great service.
5. A Brand That’s Different
Banks suffer from a naming problem. Nearly 66 percent of banks use the word state, first, national, trust, or savings in their name. While some have better brands than others, the majority of these banks have a clear identity. Of all the banks on Money.com’s best-in-the-region list, only one uses any of those words. Still, that bank has a clear visual and tonal brand.
Browsing the banks’ marketing materials, it’s clear each bank’s leadership and marketing teams are willing to make a decision one way or the other as opposed to riding the fence and trying to be all things to all people.
A bank that sticks to its identity will attract the clients it’s best suited to serve, and in the end all parties are happier.
Does Your Bank Have What It Takes?
No one’s saying your bank has to be the best in your region, but if you want to grow, you’ve got to be better. There are some clear commonalities between the banks that are doing things right, and pursuing a like-minded approach will pay dividends for your bank and improve the customer experience.
It’s up to you to determine which areas can impact your bank’s culture in a positive way. And you don’t have to do it alone. Find a partner that can help you shore up your weaknesses and keep you moving in the right direction.
Bank brands are the worst.
A few years ago, a group in the U.K. asked consumers what brands they’d like to sit next to at dinner. Facebook, Apple, Nike, and the other usual suspects popped up. But there were no bank brands at the table. More surprisingly, the same survey asked which brands respondents would argue with most at the dinner table. Microsoft grabbed first place—but still, no banks.
Responses to the second question say a lot more about the type of emotions bank brands cultivate within people. Any lingering negative sentiment from the Great Recession has long since dwindled away. Today, banks don’t really stir up anything in today’s consumers.
Couple this emotionless relationship with the rise of the “total experience economy,” where technology and ease of use create today’s best brands, and you’ll find that banks have found a home in the brand gutter. Why do banks insist on sticking to a failing course? Why do banks fall back on the same old process when evaluating who they are, what they want to be, and how to explain that to the larger market?
In banking, we use words like service and friendly and caring and community and cutting edge and innovation and laa de frickin’ da, but in reality, we just spent a few thousand dollars coming up with synonyms for customer service, solutions, and goals. Are we that vanilla, or are we just approaching the “exercise” the wrong way?
The Branding “Exercise”
Over the years, I’ve been part of more than 20 brand exercises to help banks, entertainment companies, large pharmaceutical companies, and law firms define or rethink who they are. I’ve seen it from every perspective: as an agency, client, creative, and company. All suffer from their own inherent disconnects, but still, I’ve grown progressively cynical of the output from this “exercise” and now find the whole charade quite amusing. If you don’t know, a typical (and yes, oversimplified) branding exercise goes something like this:
Company hires Agency.
Agency collects basic information about (e.g., has interns Google) Company and possibly sends a survey to Company employees.
Agency and Company meet in a room and proceed to discuss the company using a few methods:
Method 1: “If You Were A [Object]…” This is a branding original from the earliest days of advertising, where office supplies, cars, and other inanimate objects are used to elicit descriptive words for how staff members think about their company. This usually results in a mix of “We’re old, but changing” or “We have some old parts, but we’re starting to make some upgrades,” and other nebulous allusions.
Method 2: Draw. Literally ask people to draw your ideal customer, or color something based on what color your company would be. Eventually, it becomes “Doodle because you’re no longer paying attention or you no longer care about this branding session.”
Method 3: The Quadrant or Spectrum. This is a personal favorite of mine. Each person makes a mark on a number of scales (think Fun/Serious, Cutting Edge/Established, or Upscale/Accessible) to show where they think the company fits. Then, Agency determines the averages.
Agency takes research and flip charts back to the office and plugs in popular words from the meeting before using online thesauruses to come up with new words.
Two to three weeks later, Agency delivers a positioning statement and messaging document chock full of everyone’s favorite buzzwords spread throughout. Something like…
We help people achieve more and become successful by giving them great advice and service, but still earn a reasonable profit because we believe in innovation and, also, you are not a number; you are a relationship and a client, and we love our communities and believe in hometown values, but we’re not the cheapest, but we are the best.
And then the big reveal. A new tagline: Banking on You. And Us. Together. Forever. One You. One Us. One Why.
Company feels good, and the new “Banking on You” campaign comes out. Everyone feels like they’ve finally created something special.
But they haven’t. They’ve just created a campaign. And three to five years later, a new marketing person or executive will repeat the process with a new agency, because Company has “outgrown” the previous “brand.”
Exercising the Wrong Parts
If you do the same workout every day, you won’t see your body change very much. Muscles get complacent, and the human body adapts to repetition. The same applies to branding. You can’t change your makeup without giving your system a shock from time to time. You have to change the “weights” and the “routine.”
Adjusting the Brand “Weights”
Your bank brand gets weighed down by a number of internal and external drags. There will always be regulation and compliance, but the larger weights tend to be consumer/market fragmentation, heritage or legacy, and misguided research.
Consumer (or market) fragmentation clouds the brand process for many banks. The moment your community bank leaves its original community and grows into a new town, or moves from a rural to more metropolitan location, your “ideals” are challenged. I’ve heard so many “things are different across the river” conversations in banking. Yes, towns are unique, but there are many brands that permeate towns of all sizes, so don’t let fragmentation weigh down your thinking.
Heritage and legacy have long plagued companies. Need a case study? See Sears. Banks are often old, but more than likely, you’re not who you were in 1924. It’s OK to throw it back to the good ol’ days—nostalgia is a powerful and wonderful sentiment—but it can’t define who you are today. Don’t discount an aspirational component to your new brand simply because the “older markets aren’t going to like it.”
Misguided research is the death knell of so many agencies. In the earliest conversations with clients, they’re often getting piecemeal reports from various company sources. Then, the agency uses the information from those reports to develop broad generalizations about the types of customers the bank serves. All of these assumptions are made from just a few weeks’ worth of data. If there are two things I know about banking, they are:
There’s a ton of great data about the bank’s customers available.
No one in the bank has the same information.
Don’t get overly ambitious about something you see in the data unless you’ve verified it with three other sources.
Changing the Brand “Routine”
Branding should focus a company; it should help set the foundation for every message, ad, technology decision, and customer experience that falls under it. This rarely happens in most industries, but even less so in banking.
Heritage, notoriety, and service are often go-to bank brand foundations. Legacy can only take bank brands so far today, and service is too watered down after years of empty promises and the rise of online accountability through reviews, ratings, and consumer forums. We live in a world where many top brands are much younger than their established rivals. Although being in the business for 100 years does mean something to consumers, it just doesn’t mean as much as it once did.
When you want to rebrand or refresh your brand, take time before you reach out to a creative firm to talk through exactly what you hope to accomplish. A goal of cleaning up a logo and creating a consistent, multichannel look and feel is very different than “We’ve outgrown who we are and need to change the way we communicate to customers and the larger market.” If the latter is most true for you, you don’t need an agency to immediately come in and run the show. Take the time to bring your employees and customers together to discuss what your organization is, how it’s changed, and what it needs to get better. And if this is truly a brand you want to live for many years to come, let a few creative companies take their best shot at it. Why limit yourself to one group?
Brand or Deliver
Before you start any branding endeavor, make sure you’re seeking the right output. I fluctuate on how important bank branding is on a year-to-year basis—not because it’s not important to understand who you are and what sets you apart; I just don’t think banks accomplish much when reviewing and/or updating their brands.
In a commodity business, where 90 percent of competitors have nearly the same product set and essentially the same message about superior customer service, will branding set you apart? It should, right?
That sounds like an opportunity to me. But, given that banks always seem to fall into the same routine, should they not shift their attention to simply out-executing the competition? Are the best brands today not the best customer experience companies that also filled a timely need in the market? Think Uber, Netflix, Amazon…do you know what any of these companies really standfor? Or do you just value the convenience and experience they provide that far outpaces any similar service?
This brings up the almighty question: Does traditional branding really help banks succeed? Yes, you need consistency in look, message, etc., but beyond brand consistency, should your branding strategy be more of a customer experience strategy? When will a bank come to the table and not only say, “We make banking easy,” but actually devote multiple positions to ensure that every customer touchpoint is perfected? When will banking COOs, CTOs/CIOs, and CMOs work through a CCO (chief customer officer) who has to approve each change based on what it will do to the customer experience?
In other words, when will banks stop branding and start delivering?
When’s the last time an “SEO expert” emailed you, promising to make all of your online marketing dreams come true? You know the one:
Your bank website isn’t optimized, and we drove 8000% growth and boosted sales by a lot for a client, so call us!
Hopefully, you deleted the spam and moved on with your day.
The truth is, there’s no magic bullet for search engine optimization, which helps your website rank higher in search engines. And the promises you’re receiving in those eloquent sales emails don’t tell the whole story
SEO is hard. It’s more than just three to six months of enhancements—it’s a long-term, persistent commitment. It’s an iterative and experimental activity at times. And it can be tough for marketers to see the light at the end of this sometimes arduous tunnel.
But, when done right, SEO delivers some of the strongest results in modern marketing.
What’s the recipe? Let’s walk through the journey that led to a recent win for one of our commercial bank clients.
The Strategic Start
Like any good marketing initiative, a sound strategy goes a long way to determining success. This means having a solid understanding of the level of competition for any search queries (the exact terms people are searching for) you want to win while making sure you have the content to back up the terms people are searching for, and setting up analytics to measure success and ROI.
Note: specific details of this program were left out to protect the integrity of our client’s competitive marketing program.
In this instance, we focused on niche lending with a key marketing goal of keeping acquisition costs lower than they’d be using traditional methods (e.g. trade events and publication advertising). Our strategic process included:
1. Creating a roadmap for producing content, testing, and optimizing, then making adjustments as needed.
2. Developing targeted content covering key focuses within the niche industry. Topics ranged from broader business best practices to supplier chain specifics for the industry.
3. Competitive analysis of competitor lenders and “share of search” companies.
The SEO Technicals
If you want to achieve your strategic SEO goals, your website has to address some foundational “technicals” to ensure it’s looked upon favorably by Google and other search engines. This work involves making sure your site is optimized for mobile, loads well, has proper structure and tags, and includes no broken links or structural issues that would cause a search engine to “demote” your site.
It’s nerdy, but important, groundwork for your future success.
When we began, our client’s website was dated, poorly built for the new mobile world, and had a number of structural issues. So, we helped them redesign their site, with all of the modern cues for search engines. This immediately helped our client rank better for their core brand and services. Google recognized them and these foundational elements set up our client for their next endeavor: search-oriented content marketing.
Organic search alone doubled within a month of the changes and increased 6X within four months.
The Tests, Misses, and Hits
Once you’ve mastered the fundamentals, the real fun begins. Great content marketing is goal-oriented. Some of your content should be fun, some should be educational, and some highly visual and conversational for social media. All of these categories of content can impact search, but more often, you need an “organic search content program” to go along with the other information you’re producing. This category of your content program is focused on performance above all else. If an article begins to win for a term in search, it warrants further optimization and additional content development to capture even more terms. If a content piece on your website doesn’t perform well, it needs to be revised, re-purposed, or archived. Again, this area of content is all about the performance. And great performance requires practice, effort, and learning through some failures along the way.
Our client’s organic content program combined research with well-structured writing to deliver the best possible chance for the organization to rank for important search terms. The process (at least to the level of detail we’ll share) looks like this:
1. A content calendar is built from the strategic work for each quarter of the year.
2. At the end of each month, content is scored on its effectiveness (search ranking MoM change, the effect on related content, etc.).
3. Every quarter, content is picked for optimization, expansion, and/or archiving. Keep in mind, some content may “win” up to a year or two later thanks to other influencers (e.g. a link from a prominent website, Google ranking for your site’s authority on a subject, etc.).
4. This process of content evaluation is repeated alongside the more technical keyword research. All of these evaluations provide a nice feedback loop back to your content strategy which can (and should) evolve based on the performance of your program.
It’s important to note that search engines don’t always behave the way you think they will (or how you’d like them to), but a consistent and thoughtful process will yield results. This isn’t 1998 web SEO—you can’t simply create 50 web pages stuffed with keywords and expect results. Rather, you must first create optimized content across multiple channels then weave it into your overall marketing and audience strategies. Most importantly, it should feel natural. Our client saw 90 days of minimal impact before doubling the traffic they’d already gained from technical improvements.
The Return on SEO
Once you’ve established a process for and consistency within content development, you’ll begin to see the wins increase. Google will assign more authority to you in certain topics—and searchers will follow. This is traffic you’d never see otherwise! And while you made an initial investment, the longevity of your ranking for a particular keyword far outpaces any campaign advertisement.
For our client, ROI was straightforward (and outstanding). The initial investment made in content now provides more 20,000 new website visitors a year, specifically aligned with the niche audience they were targeting. Think about that. When can you market to an unknown group and achieve the same volume of near-perfect intent? With a good qualifier tool and only a half a percent of that traffic converting into a lead, that’s 100 new, high-dollar leads that never would have made it to their organization otherwise. For one year, ROI projects to 300%, but that doesn’t account for the lifecycle of that content—which will continue to produce results for years to come
Interesting in learning more about how SEO works for banks and when you should (and should not) pursue it? Reach out to us.
With financial institutions across America looking to add clients every day, community banks offer a distinct set of advantages they can leverage to win the new customer acquisition game.
To be successful, community banks must embrace what makes them different from their competition.
There are lots of great reasons for new clients to choose community banks, and I’m not just saying that because I work for them. To be successful, community banks must embrace what makes them different from their competition.
Sure, you’ve got an app, and you’ve got great products. So do they. Why not take the opportunity to focus on your bank’s successes in small business lending, or the fact that your clients can speak to real people who know them and their banking history—and that they can speak to that same person again the next time they call?
Even if you’ve already built a strong brand foundation, you must continue to attract, onboard, and nurture each new client, while making sure to remarket to those who haven’t made the switch to your bank. It’s the key to success, and something we have tons of experience doing for banks like yours.
1. Community bank clients prefer to support local, homegrown businesses.
Your bank’s deep-seated roots offer you a unique advantage over your larger, nationally focused competition. A shared passion for your community is attractive to clients and prospects alike.
Community banks are locally owned and managed—themselves small businesses within the community. Therefore, you’re likely aware of the same challenges that other local small business owners worry about.
With the continued rise of online and mobile banking, there’s a chance that the members of your community who prefer face-to-face interaction have just one brick-and-mortar banking option: your bank. In fact, one-fifth of all U.S. counties don’t have a single regional or national bank branch to serve the financial needs of their residents.
Right now, there’s a group of banking prospects who will always prefer personal contact—the ability to call a human being or come in to speak with one about their banking needs—over interactive voice response (IVR) systems. That’s a huge differentiator, and one you can offer to them using even the most basic marketing methods.
Too many times, we wind up trying to go toe-to-toe with a larger bank’s technology instead of simply communicating what truly differentiates us.
Don’t take for granted your ability to serve and market to local clients based on a shared passion for your region (or your tenure serving the needs of clients within it). Otherwise you could miss out on developing real, lasting relationships that strengthen both your bottom dollar and your community’s overall health and financial stability.
TAKEAWAY: Don’t forget to tell people that the experience at your bank is more human than the competition. Too many times, we wind up trying to go toe-to-toe with a larger bank’s technology instead of simply communicating what truly differentiates us.
2. Lending decisions go deeper than the numbers.
Community banks lend more than $3.5 billion to small businesses on an annual basis. Where larger banks might make decisions on predetermined formulas alone, you probably have more freedom to offer flexibility in lending, based on knowing more about each applicant—a cache of info that includes previous banking relationships, as well as character references and spending habits.
More than 50% of small business loans come from community banks.
In 2015, less than 4% of residential property loans made by community banks went into default.
Local borrowers are more responsible with community bank loans versus those granted by larger, national banks. Less than 4% of residential property loans made by community banks went into default, compared to more than 10% for big banks, according to the same Harvard Kennedy School study.
Additionally, you’re able to provide ancillary benefits to small business owners. Most larger regional and national banks might approve or deny funding from nondescript locations far away. As a community bank, you have the opportunity to go above and beyond, approving loans with greater flexibility and helping your local clients connect with local suppliers, customers, and businesses.
TAKEAWAY: Base your lending decisions on the complete picture of each applicant, rather than strictly using formulas and calculations. This approach lets you offer ‘round-the-corner clients and prospects an experience that bigger, national banks are unwilling to provide.
3. Community bank clients are happier.
As a whole, the banking industry is getting better at customer service and satisfaction. But when it comes to getting the best, most personalized service, community banks are king. Regional and community banks recorded a 2018 ACSI satisfaction score of 84, with super-regionals (79) and national banks (77) lagging significantly behind.
Similar data is present on the business side of banking too, where community banks have become the small business lender of choice. According to the Federal Reserve’s 2019 Small Business Credit Survey, 79% of independent business owners who used community banks indicated satisfaction with their overall experience, compared with 67% for large banks and just 49% for online lenders.
Those solid relationships we talked about earlier? They’re built on satisfaction and trust. Take the story of Huff Ice Cream, a family-owned commercial business located in upstate New York.
During an annual review, Huff’s community bank loan officer encouraged them to consider adding flood insurance protection, even though the ice-cream distributorship had never flooded once during its 50-year history. Huff followed the banker’s advice and added coverage—which helped protect them from $1M in future losses when the business flooded twice in six years.
Clients choose community banks for the same reasons they choose the friends they spend time with—they know them, they trust them, and the banks have their clients’ backs.
TAKEAWAY: Community banks make people happy and garner more trust. Clients conduct more business with the banks they trust. This is low-hanging fruit: engage with your clients, and they’re more likely to stick around longer, use more of your products, and, most importantly, send you new clients who will boost your new deposit numbers—and help you sleep better.
Clients choose community banks for the same reasons they choose the friends they spend time with—they know them, they trust them, and the banks have their clients’ backs. With new client acquisition at the top of every bank CEO’s priority list, make sure to use the advantages you have as a community bank to your advantage. Whereas national lenders may come and go, your community wouldn’t be what it is without you there.
Strive to make lending and customer service decisions that benefit you, your clients, and your community—even if they require a little more time and effort—because they’ll pay off in the long run.
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.
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.
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.
4. “Geoconquesting” is a good idea, but not a silver bullet.
People go into banks most often for one of three reasons:
To open an account
To close an account
To transact
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.
After nearly a decade of financial marketing, we’ve noticed a single question that keeps turning up like a bad penny.
“How do I deal with compliance officers?”
Then again, guess what we hear from compliance officers.
We know that you, they, and everyone else in your organization wants to be compliant. After all, you’re all on the same team. And we know that you’re doing a fantastic job marketing your bank and its products to new and current customers alike. But in the midst of that progress, your compliance officer’s role becomes one, not unlike the parent of two siblings who each want something different for dinner.
Compliance officers need to have a very specific set of skills in order to do their jobs correctly. Each day, they make sure that everyone within your entire organization has been trained to follow its own policies and procedures across all facets of business operations. This is what’s known as institutional compliance. At the same time, they must also ensure that all existing financial regulations (and related ethical codes) are followed to the letter—while constantly uncovering, researching, and implementing new or changing industry regulations, of which the potential to run afoul is significant.
Sometimes, the rules and regulations they must follow are cut-and-dried while, at other times, your compliance officers must make judgment calls that will keep your organization free of issues that may put your bank at risk. And just because something worked before (or you did things a certain way in the past) doesn’t mean that will happen again—because the rules are constantly changing.
If you work with your bank’s compliance officers, we’re sure you’ve been frustrated at times. But so have they. Our goal is to help you—and your fellow employees—build better relationships with your compliance officers, one step at a time. And if you want to tackle all five at once, that’s even better.
1. Allow Your Compliance Officers to Do Their Jobs
Our first tip is the easiest one to actually follow. Simply put, your compliance officer has possibly the most underappreciated role within your bank. His or her main duty is to know the ins and outs of legal and regulatory requirements so that the bank operates with the highest level of integrity. Your compliance officer won’t make decisions based on profit potential or new product awareness, but on staying within the lines.
Although his or her recommendations might not be what you hoped to hear, failure to follow your compliance officer’s advice could be much more costly in the long run.
“Regulators aren’t just more aggressively pursuing institutions who break the law,” said Adrian Morrissey, manager of the compliance division at global, specialist professional recruitment consultancy, Robert Walters. “Higher penalties are being imposed on lawbreakers. Compliance has become a pivotal issue for banks, because failing to do their diligence on customers and transactions leaves a company open to scrutiny and litigation.”
2. Empower Them to Voice Their Expertise
Your compliance officer must be able to speak freely without fear of retribution or ridicule. So, it’s important for you to take time to empower those in compliance, and show them that their questions, opinions, and abilities to anticipate and solve problems have great value.
“Sometimes, it’s hard to feel like part of the team while convincing everyone around you that you’re doing a job that must be done so that your organization can maintain compliance and thrive,” said Brigham Young University-Idaho faculty member and compliance expert, CJ Wolf, in a recently published article at Healthicity.com. “You know what’s at stake, but sometimes it can feel impossible to get everyone on board.”
3. Help Other Employees Want to Comply With Compliance Training
Yes, official legal and compliance reviews should always take place. That’s a no-brainer. But, taking the step to ensure that your other employees have the opportunity to understand the rules and regulations guiding the financial industry will help improve both processes and efficiency.
“If you want 100% compliance (or 100% of your employees to complete the compliance training with a passing score), your training must be usable for all employees,” said Gauri Reyes, principal learning strategist and CEO at Triple Point Advisors. “For example, if using online training for compliance training programs, providing employees with desktop and mobile learning options lets employees choose when and where to learn.”
It’s also important to remember that training must be both ADA-compliant and, in many cases, available in multiple languages. The more your team knows, the less stressful the process will be for your compliance officers.
4. Perform Risk Assessments
Risk assessments not only let your compliance officers know where to focus their time, but they engage other bank employees, too
In Compliance 101: A Guide to Building Effective Compliance Programs, Lori A. Brown, Nikita Williams, and Christopher Miles advance the notion that risk assessments allow organizations to maximize the utility of scarce resources by directing them to the most significant compliance issues they face.
So, be sure to schedule risk assessments that not only focus on the most significant issues, but ones that also include those with boots on the ground.
“When individuals who have day-to-day administrative responsibilities participate in identifying compliance risks and developing mitigation plans, they’re more likely to actively participate in the compliance process,” said the book’s authors.
5. Fix What’s Wrong, and Make Things Right
When banks fall out of compliance, a common practice upon catching a mistake is to fix it, ignore the past, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
“‘Correcting from now on,’ is a terrible attitude to have, when it comes to overpayments, but I’ve heard this from senior level management leaders,” Wolf said. “The whole purpose of a compliance program is to prevent or detect and correct noncompliance.
“We get it—nobody likes to give back money,” he said. “But in the case of overpayments, it’s not your money. You’re giving back money that’s not actually your money.”
Help all your employees feel a part of the solution—not just the problem. It will take your entire team to make things right, and that collective expertise might be just what your compliance officers need to assist them in getting your organization back on track.
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Finally—and this one’s a bonus—never, ever rest on your laurels, for that’s when disaster will strike. “We’ve always done it this way,” is never a suitable course of action.
“As a compliance officer, this is the worst excuse I hear, because if your process is non-compliant, and you’ve “always done it this way,” you might be facing some significant payback issues or other ramifications, given the longevity of the problem,” Wolf said. “Don’t wait until it’s too late.”
If all of your employees feel invested, not only in their positions, but in the organization as well, they’re more apt to take ownership. That culture of teamwork starts with you.
Your community bank is essential. You likely serve a group of clients that’s overlooked by larger banks. You’re part of a complex and stressful ecosystem. The balance is hard to strike—you must adopt the right resources to serve your clients without losing the human touch that separates you from other banks.
The days when “community bank” was synonymous with “small bank” are long gone. Consolidation and other outside threats loom. You must learn to create healthy growth without losing your bank’s identity.
On the merger and acquisition side, it’s an insanely complicated and trying process (especially your first time around). Simply put, it’s eat or be eaten.
So let’s concentrate on organic growth—marketing your bank to more clients within your footprint while slowly expanding those geographic boundaries. How do you strike a healthy balance of loan growth while controlling funding of deposits to maintain the yield that delivers profits to your institution?
The secret to marketing is simple: tell more people better. Good news—this doesn’t require a huge budget. It does require commitment, some experience, and at least a little expertise.
You can expand over time, but every minute you wait to start, you lose ground. Maybe you’ve started, but you’re stuck. You’re not beating the competition, and you don’t know where to go.
We see many, many ways in which banks are wasting money, time, and human capital. If you feel you’re squandering opportunities, you might be guilty of one (or more) of these 10 cardinal sins:
1. You truly don’t see the value of marketing.
The success of most community banks has been based on shoe leather and handshakes. Personal relationships are directly proportional to asset growth. But what happens when that stalls—when the big bank de-novos into your community, cuts loan rates, and boosts deposit interest? When you’ve pressed the flesh for your whole career (and it’s worked really, really well), it’s hard to see the value in increasing an expense line item.
I understand. You may not be adversarial to marketing. You simply don’t understand it.
Too many banks approach marketing by just checking the box. An admin person gets a “promotion” and a “budget,” then is expected to perform. Perhaps you send them to some training. However, the expense line item bugs you and you’d really like to see some ROI.
The fix:
Commit, but start slow. Understand that, in the beginning, a marketing department doesn’t run a P&L—it’s an expense. Allocate a budget you’re willing to spend. Set goals and determine a path toward accomplishing those goals. If you and your staff genuinely have no idea where to begin, hire some help. Yes, it’s self-serving for an agency to make this recommendation; but it’s just true.
2. You don’t know how to do it.
It’s hard to admit, but ignorance is the number-one reason for failures within bank marketing. It’s tough to get traction if you and your staff don’t know what you’re doing. Moreover, you’ll only make it worse because you will damage the belief in marketing as a valid activity.
If you fall into this category, I won’t beat you up.
The fix:
It’s simple (and a bit self-serving): find outside help. It doesn’t have to be Mabus Agency (but we are the best option). The money spent with a qualified agency can help you experience early wins that return revenue to the bank, fund future activities, and increase confidence in your efforts.
3. You convince yourself you don’t have the budget to compete.
Inaction is second to ignorance in creating failure within financial marketing.
Don’t psych yourself out. Being the underdog might be a better position than you think. In his book, “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell makes the point about the eponymous story, that David likely had an advantage over his larger opponent. Gladwell posits that David’s youth, stealth, and accuracy from practice with a sling made him the perfect enemy of the larger, slower-moving giant. Because David was not seen as a threat, he was able to get into position and fire while Goliath scoffed. (I highly recommend this book.)
David won because of his size. Not despite it.
Our work with banks proves that “bigger” doesn’t always mean “winner.”
The fix:
Concentrate your limited resources on your most significant opportunity. Everyone has less of a budget than they want or need. You must get used to concentration—and exercise the ability to say no to compelling opportunities that might seem like a decent fit. You must reject activities that spread your resources too thin.
4. You don’t want to poke the bear.
First-time marketers often worry about the consequences of their efforts:
“If I start marketing, will others just spend more money?”
“Will it escalate out of control?”
“Maybe the competition will drop/increase their rate.”
If you’re trying to fly under your competition’s radar, you’re probably flying under your potential clients’ radar, too.
Hopefully, it’s apparent that this is not a winning strategy.
The fix:
You don’t have to get in your competitors’ faces to advertise. Tell your story. Again, the trick is doing better today than you did yesterday. You don’t have to compare yourself to the competition, but if you have something that sets you apart, you can (and should) brag on that item. Regardless, you can’t live your marketing life in contrast with another financial institution. You must understand your competitive environment, then execute your own plan.
5. You’re too busy copying them.
They put an ad in the newspaper. Why aren’t we in the newspaper?!
They sponsored a community event. Why weren’t we the sponsor?!
They put their bankers in an ad. Why didn’t we?!
If you’re chasing your competition like this, you’ll never catch up. Bankers just like you, all over the country, face undue stress related to tactics like these. I believe this tendency is derivative of that same competitive letdown you feel when “they beat us for that loan.” It feels like a loss.
Marketing like your competition only depletes valuable energy and leads to homogenized advertising environments that are less effective for all financial institutions.
The fix:
Zig when they zag. When your newspaper rep calls and says, “…but every other bank will be in this publication…,” I want you to grit your teeth and say, “NO.” It will be tough in the beginning, but you must understand that it does you no good to be diluted amongst every other bank. You have to convince your bankers that you’re not missing out by being the only bank missing from a Chamber of Commerce welcome bag containing seven other banks’ promotional items. But it’s not about sitting on the sideline. Your competition is zagging. What are you doing to zig? Own a premium ad position in a key publication (that’s not littered with banks). Commit to a strong billboard message. Show up where you can stand out, and own that platform.
This is a real-world example. A Chamber representative brought this welcome bag to a branch opening. What good does this do any of these banks?
6. You’re buying what THEY’RE selling
I had an epiphany while attending a recent bank marketing event.
I walked through the tradeshow floor and surveyed the vendors.
Represented were a couple of sales tools (CRMs), personal financial management systems, and lots of digital signage vendors. All of these represented activities that start after a potential client engages with your institution.
Where was all the stuff that attracts a new client? Nonexistent. Absent. There were no digital media representatives. No traditional media. Only a bit of social media.
The problem is that we assume what we’re being shown is what’s important, and it’s what we should be considering.
If you engaged every vendor at the event, you’d still be missing a valuable component: how to attract new clients.
The fix:
Make sure you utilize techniques designed to attract new clients. Yes, it’s important to nurture clients and deepen relationships. However, you first have to make certain new clients are coming in. The great news for you? If your competition hasn’t adopted this philosophy, you might be the only one marketing in your trade area.
7. You admire them too much.
The relationships amongst bankers drive me a bit nuts sometimes. Bankers will compete like bitter enemies over a single loan or client relationship. However, when it comes time to market against the bank down the street, a banker will say, “I’m just not going to do that to him/her.”
It’s like a strange code of honor—one I don’t understand.
This attitude is shrinking, but it’s still around. I’m all for friendly competition, but competition is the keyword. Make certain you’re competitive.
The fix:
Play golf at the annual event with your competitors, but maintain a healthy marketing plan. You don’t have to denigrate your competitors to market, but you have to gain awareness amongst your potential clients.
8. You’re in the industry trap.
Bank-specific vendors do a great job scaring you to death about compliance and security. Then they turn around and charge you based on those fears.
Security and compliance are vitally important, but sometimes, the focus on financial-specific solutions obscures other solutions outside the “built-for-banks” marketplace.
There is a limited pool of bank vendors, so we all wind up using the same tools. Community banks are dependent on outside companies to develop software and solutions. The biggest pain point is when your institution outgrows its current solution, but you’re stuck in a contract.
The fix:
Vet thoroughly. When adopting a new software or solution, we suggest bringing in at least one potential solution from outside the financial world. Even if an outside-the-industry solution doesn’t fit, it might enlighten you to functionality you wouldn’t have known existed.
9. You think bankers are more important than brand.
Want to close the browser? Hang in here with me, because you need to read this more than anyone else. Bankers are infinitely valuable to the banking process. Absolutely. However, when stepping into the world of advertising, putting bankers in an ad is less important than building a brand.
I’ve seen banks spend thousands of dollars building the “brand” of an individual banker. Then that banker (along with his/her portfolio) was lifted out. The new bank didn’t have to pay to build that banker’s following—just a salary it was willing to pay anyway.
Also, bankers seem to think that consumers like to see bankers in ads. A consumer might value a personal relationship with his/her banker. However, a client appreciates a strong institution more than a relationship with a single banker. If you don’t believe that, you probably haven’t worked in one of those strong institutions.
The fix:
When you pay to build your brand, that investment persists beyond bankers who come and go. You build a foundation that communicates strength to a brand-centric culture. You can attract more bankers in the future. In short, you win.
10. That’s just not what community banks do!
Hahahahahahaha.
The fix:
Either shut the doors or sell. Otherwise, we’ll meet when one of your competitors hires us; and you don’t want that.
