How We Fit

Company Background

We Are a Complete Partner

We are a full-service advertising agency that specializes in financial marketing. Our goal is to reduce the stress of creating high quality, effective marketing and advertising and help banks and financial technology companies like yours reach their full potential. From strategy to creative and media placement, we bring deep expertise and a high level of skill to every facet of your organization’s marketing.

We Understand Banking

Talking about our commitment to better financial marketing isn’t enough; we back it up in action. Every Mabus Agency strategist, creative, and support team member is required to participate in ongoing bank training through the American Banker’s Association. We work to make certain that each staff member you work with has completed ABA’s core curriculum and understands bank regulation and compliance.

We Create Sustainable Brands

Mabus Agency discovers and delivers highly effective and well-appointed brands. We have worked with a variety of banks, financial technology companies, and financial service providers. We help our clients establish all aspects of a powerful brand presence. Strong and flexible logos and wordmarks are supported by appropriate color palettes, meticulous font systems, and compelling patterns. Brand personality and narrative form the basis of messaging. Once our process is complete, you and your team will have a clear understanding of your brand’s visual, written, and audible communications and the flexibility to fulfill almost any project.

We Drive Measurable Results

Beyond our general knowledge of the financial sector, we are passionate about driving ground-level growth. We don’t just want to prove our worth; we want to ensure our work provides the best possible results. We work with clients to choose metrics, build thoughtful data dashboards to track our campaigns, make adjustments, and continually improve. Marketing and brand awareness aren’t just fluff to us. We create work that drives measurable results.

We Know Bank Growth

We help support bank growth—from rapid organic expansion to M&A activity, to de novo announcements. Renasant Bank stood at $2.6 billion in assets when we began work for the bank. Now its assets will total more than $13 Billion. During that growth, we supported eight mergers and expanded into three new markets through de novo entries. Our client Minnwest Bank recently completed two near-simultaneous mergers. In the regulators’ closing remarks, they cited Minnwest’s merger communications as the clearest and most concise they had seen. Our staff’s total combined asset growth support totals more than $25 billion in acquired assets and 16 individual mergers. Mabus Agency’s flexibility and special skill in supporting rapid expansion can greatly benefit First State Bank & Trust Company.

Our Approach

We are a strategy-first company. We begin each new client relationship with an intensive discovery session. We know banking can be confusing to the public (and even confusing within the companies that provide these services). So, we obsess over finding not only your key differentiator, but the most understandable way to communicate your value to the largest audience possible.

Our goal is to simplify the complexities of financial marketing. And to that end, this video explains the areas we think are most critical facets of communication that allow organizations to success.

See How We Do It

Account Management & Billing Process

We built our processes around transparency and accountability. We provide excellent customer service beyond our industry-leading creative. We proactively make certain you know where every marketing dollar is going. This includes:

Complete transparency on all projects by giving you access to our project management and proofing software. You see what we see: real-time reporting on each project in queue.
Dollar-level reconciliation on all project, creative, and media billing each month.
Maintenance of an escrow account for all media purchases. This is well beyond industry standard and requirement. We maintain clear lines in regards to media fees and will not mix these in our GL accounts.

Meet Your Team

You will onboard with one of our three dedicated teams, each of which focuses only on a small group of clients. This team is well-versed in banking and undergoes routine training around products, regulation, and compliance and is fully supported by the entire staff at Mabus Agency.

Your expanded team includes media placement, video, motion graphics, and digital marketing departments, who work closely with your dedicated team on your projects, as well as access to teams dedicated to other clients (should your workload demand it).

Point of Contact

Communication Overview

Standing weekly check-in calls with your Mabus team
Monthly web conference around projects, creative collaboration, and budget reconciliation
Quarterly strategic check-ins, held in-person at your headquarters

The Creative Team

Corey Childers

Senior Designer

Supported growth of a financial institution from $2.6 Billion in Assets to $13+ Billion
Incredibly prolific and talented designer
Longest tenured Mabus Agency employee

Jordan West

Senior Designer

Leads team in brand-setting and visual communication
Well-versed in utilizing existing brand elements and creating additional components to increase usability and flexibility of brands
Uses skills in typography, layout, and design to build incredible brands

Mike Reynolds

Lead Web Developer

Oversees Mabus Agency’s entire web department
Built dozens of websites from the ground up
Expert in design, code, security, and ADA compliance
Maintains and oversees all bank websites

Strategic Leaders

Josh Mabus

President, Chief Creative Officer

Worked hand-in-hand with Renasant Bank to boost assets from $2.6 billion to $17+ billion—reinventing how community banks can market through growth
More than a decade of bank marketing experience—from small local institutions (sub-$200 million) to regional banks
Extensive strategic and creative direction experience
Helped transform marketing of 20+ financial institutions

Your Expanded Team

We provide comprehensive solutions without third-party involvement. Here are three in-house groups (outside your dedicated team) that will provide broad-based resources to support your goals.

Media Placement

Our team specializes in finding the right media mix to drive engagement, conversion, and results. Through traditional, digital, geotargeting, social, environmental, and sports marketing—our goal is to find the right combination that drives what matters to you.

Digital Lead Generation

Lead generation is a complex mix of clear branding, compelling content, thoughtful user experiences, and media channel optimization. Our team first creates a focused, long-term plan to generate leads that best fits your bank’s strategic goals and available technology. Using analytics, marketing automation and other optimization tools, we then use a variety of approaches to test and accelerate the investments that generate the highest quality leads for your bank.

Motion Graphics

Consumers who understand banking products are much more likely to engage with them—and you. In many cases, the complexities of banking products require an additional boost to help increase understanding. That boost comes from animation. We use motion graphics to help consumers connect the dots around your products and provide deeper understanding of them. Our motion graphics department uses its experience working on national brands to help you bring your products and services to life.