4 Hurdles for community bank marketers. This post by James Gibbons was originally published as an article in the American Bankers Association Marketing Journal. Marketing is hard-well, not hard exactly, but tricky. People who've done a lot of it know things like: hitting the target is a lot harder than getting near the target, hitting it twice is something like lightning striking twice, getting a letter or email opened is about fifty times harder than getting it delivered-and getting a click-through is even harder. Marketing people know that certain messages don't work in outdoor...or radio...or newspaper...or television, and that the…

8 Bank Marketing Priorities-in order. The need to balance the short-term and the long-term, when it comes to community bank marketing planning and budgeting, is not new. But the advent of new technologies-inbound, automated email, lead nurturing, PPC, SEO, digital, retargeting-has aggravated the issue. We no longer look at the market and say, "what can we do?" We now look at all the opportunities and say, "what should we do?" For bank marketers, there is a real need for help in setting priorities. What comes first? What comes next? What comes next year? What comes next lifetime? While every situation…

4 reasons community banks should love millennials For as long as there have been baby boomers, bank marketing has been focused on this giant demographic bubble. Remember the song, "We've only just begun?" A classic appeal to the confident optimism of the baby boom-originally written as a jingle for a financial institution. Well, considering that people secure their professional relationships by their 40s (typically), and the youngest baby boomers are now well into their 50s, it may be time to focus on a new demographic goldmine, with the same zeal as brand strategies used to tune into the boom. That…

3 Ways Inbound Marketing Helps Community Bank Branding Inbound marketing, also known as content marketing, is a strategic technology-based tool that allows you to position yourself, while inviting your best prospects to self-identify. The way the technology works is that you make an offer-information, white paper, ebook, data...something of value to a target prospect-via a call to action (CTA) button. This can be a part of a blog post, or it can be freestanding as a banner ad or social media post. A prospect interested in the value you offer clicks the button, which takes them to a landing page,…

How many brands does a community bank need? There is no doubt that well conceived and well-executed brand strategies can be beneficial to community banks. And operational critical mass can be the key to profitability and growth. But sometimes banks create chaos on the brand side, through merger and acquisitions or brand expansion, in order to achieve critical mass on the operations side. This can so complicate the life of folks concerned with bank marketing, that they find themselves using valuable time and money, just trying to make all the brands work together. As M&A activity heats up, this is…