Bank Marketing Strategy + Ideas

I have written a lot in the past several months about all of the competition that traditional banks face today.

In addition to dealing with bad real estate loans and rising FDIC fees, banks are now watching as brokerage and mutual fund firms introduce online bill pay, free checking accounts, and high yield saving accounts.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal last week, several companies offering new banking services were mentioned. TD Ameritrade has introduced online bill pay and ATM rebates, while TIAA-CREF is offering multiple banking services including free checking and high yield savings accounts through its new internet bank, TIAA Direct.

Charles Schwab is also targeting its brokerage clients with no-fee checking accounts and offering FDIC-insured savings accounts through its Charles Schwab Bank.

Fidelity Investments is offering a Fidelity Cash Management Account with many of the same services as the other brokerage companies. The only difference is Fidelity keeps its deposits in traditional banks.

They are also offering free trades to customers with higher levels of deposits.

With all of this competition, community banks have to start marketing their services.

For many banks, success in the past has been credited to location, location, location. But now, with the internet and all of this new competition, banks will have to concentrate on service, service, service!

They’ll need to get aggressive with their marketing and advertising and win the customer over with wonderful customer service.

When was the last time you called your customers on their birthdays or sent them a birthday card? Even my dentist does that. When was the last time you picked up the phone and thanked a customer for his or her business? Have you ever clipped out an article about a local business person from the newspaper and mailed it to them with a hand written note?  Or, more likely, was an overdraft notice the last thing your customers received from you?

Last week, my son put in a contract to buy a foreclosed home from Bank of America. One of the requirements was that he had to be pre-approved by their bank. Since there are three Bank of America’s between his work and his apartment, he stopped at one to meet with a customer service rep.

When he was finally able to meet with someone after waiting in line for almost 30 minutes, they took him into an empty office, dialed a 1-800 number, and handed him the phone.

This was his first visit to a Bank of America and it will be his last.

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Neal Reynolds has worked with hundreds of banks and credit unions around the country helping them to grow core deposits and market share without growing their marketing budgets. Contact him at nreynolds@eadshop.com.

I’ve written before about the need for financial institutions to train their sales reps.

The reason is this: most banks and credit unions have never had to worry about selling anything. They opened a branch and people just walked in and opened an account.

But as we all know, those days are over.

Today, even people who have bank accounts are starting to use PayPal or Google Wallet to make their purchases and commercial accounts are finding alternate forms of financing.

I’m now getting letters every week from Chase and Bank of America offering me “promotional rate checks” to use anyway I want. I can buy anything I want and pay 0% interest for 12 months. The only cost is a 2% transaction fee.

That’s cheap money – and I don’t even have to leave my office to talk to a salesperson at a bank or credit union!

In order for banks and credit unions to grow, they will have to hire or develop a sales force. And they’ll have to train them because most financial sales folks have never had to make a cold call.

They’ll need to find a good business development expert, like Rick Wemmers at Bank Marketing Pros, or find sales training materials online. I recently came across a very good and inexpensive sales training course at: http://training.sales-getters.com.

The author, Louie Bernstein, used lessons that he personally learned while making millions of dollars in sales. His materials teach you how to prospect and how to turn cold calls into warm calls. He’ll even give you the exact written words to use for every objection.

There are no excuses for not having a trained sales staff. It’s time to get going before your competition does!

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Neal Reynolds has worked with hundreds of banks and credit unions around the country helping them to grow core deposits and market share without growing their marketing budgets. Contact him at nreynolds@eadshop.com.

As community banks and credit unions continue to weather the storm, marketing departments have had to make do with smaller budgets and fewer staff.

Marketers of these financial institutions are charged with creatively generating revenue and exploring untapped markets for new customers – all with fewer resources.

To make the most of their marketing dollars, many banks and credit unions are looking to online tools and web-based marketing portals, which offer professionally-created marketing materials for a fraction of the costs associated with outside agencies or in-house creative teams.

One credit union – Texas-based Mobiloil Federal Credit Union (MOFCU) – credits online marketing portal CUMarketingCenter.com with increasing its assets from $260 million to more than $405 million, largely through enabling them to quickly and easily advertise to new markets.

“When we started with CUMarketingCenter.com, we had $260 million in assets. Today, we are at $405 million. This growth comes from putting ads out in the field in places where people have never seen credit union marketing before,” said George Perrett, MOFCU’s vice president of marketing. “The process is fast, intuitive, and you can make modifications to generate professional-looking ads in less than an hour.”

Read the full case study here.

CUMarketingCenter.com has over one thousand professionally-created layouts for everything from ads to direct mail pieces, digital signs and more.

Credit unions can join for just a few hundred dollars a month for unlimited access to the full catalog, which can be customized with a credit union’s contact information, logos and personalized copy. They also have access to the site’s library of more than two million stock photos in addition to the option of uploading their own.

Once materials are created, they are immediately ready to download and print. The whole process takes just minutes.

Community banks all over the country are using a similar site – BankMarketingCenter.com – in a similar way.

“BankMarketingCenter.com is a great tool – particularly for community banks that want a nice, consistent look and feel to their marketing materials,” said Andrea Johnson, Bank of Tucson’s SVP director of retail banking. “I came from a big commercial bank with a large marketing department, but community banks often don’t have this luxury. With BankMarketingCenter.com, it’s like having a marketing department without really having a marketing department.”

To learn more about how Bank of Tucson found success with BankMarketingCenter.com, click here to read the full case study.

Just as banks and credit unions are now offering online banking for their customers and members, the successful ones are using online tools to grow revenue and cut overhead.

Has your financial institution found other effective tools to help you produce professional marketing materials?

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Neal Reynolds has worked with hundreds of banks and credit unions around the country helping them to grow core deposits and market share without growing their marketing budgets. Contact him at nreynolds@eadshop.com.

In this new era of banking, where real estate loans are often frowned-upon by regulators, niche markets are popping-up fast. Instead of loaning money for new buildings, financial companies are even lending money for new babies.

“Fertility Finance” companies are partnering with doctors to make loans for in vitro fertilization, fertility treatments and egg harvesting.

In the past, couples have used home equity loans and credit cards to fund fertility treatments. But with traditional forms of financing drying up, dozens of companies like Springstone Financial LLC in Southborough, Mass, NBT Bancorp of Norwich, NY, and My Medical Funding in Tampa, FL, are working with doctors to promote this financing.

Their pitch is that these loans will help grow patient demand.

Traditional loans made by banks are governed by state and federal banking regulators, but some of these firms that get money from private investors aren’t monitored by banking agencies. These loans are typically unsecured with interest rates averaging 17%. (Rates are generally based on a patient’s credit-worthiness.)

What makes these types of loans so interesting from a marketing perspective is that these firms have found a niche and positioned themselves as an expert in this area. They even supply brochures for the doctor’s office. I call this vertical marketing: finding a market and designing your product around a particular need.

Obviously, this could be applied to a variety of industries.

Instead of “fertility finance” you could have “farmers finance” and position your banking products and services around a farmer’s needs. Farmers need financing to buy seeds and fertilizer with plans to pay the loan back when they sell their ripened crop.

Or what about “manufacturers financing” that supplies loans when a manufacturer gets an order knowing it will be paid back by the vendor? Companies like PrimeRevenue in Atlanta, GA, bring buyers, suppliers and financial institutions into a common trading environment that is accessed securely over the internet. They operate internationally in multiple languages and multiple currencies. The finance companies are able to see purchase orders in real-time and the manufacturers are able to get their money sooner.

Niche loans are great, but how will companies be able to find funding in this economy?

One way, called “CrowdFunding,” is currently making its way through the House and Senate. The House has already passed legislation that will allow businesses to use CrowdFunding and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the Senate will move forward on bills like this “to spur small-business growth.”

This legislation will enable companies to solicit small equity investments from large numbers of people using the internet. The most they can raise is $2 million, but this is a lot more than a majority of America’s small businesses would ever need.

As it stands, the bill would limit an investor’s investment to 10% of their income or $10,000. So, instead of investing $10,000 in a CD at a local bank that is paying .07%, an individual could “loan” that same amount to a small business and earn a lot more.

This way, the business can get funding much faster than waiting on a bank loan committee to make a decision. And since the internet is so transparent and fast, you’re able to track that company’s health even faster than the FDIC can keep up with your community bank!

The internet is changing the way we all “bank.” We can pay our bills using Google Wallet or PayPal and we’re able to borrow money for our business using CrowdFunding – all without going into a brick and mortar building.

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Neal Reynolds has worked with hundreds of banks and credit unions around the country helping them to grow core deposits and market share without growing their marketing budgets. Contact him at nreynolds@eadshop.com.