Local Community Bank marketing solutions to boost your institution's revenue and customer base!
Given that community banks operate on a much smaller, localized scale than commercial banks, marketing for community banks is much more geographically centered and focused. Community bank deposits, loans, and all other business transactions are mostly restricted to a limited geographic location, and marketing efforts are narrowed to specialize in that given area.
While community banks concentrate on promoting community-based growth, being localized can also present a unique set of challenges. With the growth of digital banking, customers no longer must depend on their local banks for their banking needs. With digital banking, national banks are just as easily accessible and are a direct competitor of community banks. It is imperative that community banks find new ways to market their products and services to have a competitive advantage over national banks and attract new business.
Local business owners and organizations rely on small banks in the community to help fund and develop the small to mid-sized businesses in the area. While the quantity of community banks in the U.S. is higher than national banks, they represent less of a market share. (Source: FDIC Community Banking Study 2020) Even with the smaller market share, community banks are instrumental in driving business, which leads to new job creation, growth, and security in the communities they serve.
Customers, who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with larger corporate banks, are turning to smaller community banks for their banking needs. They have learned to trust their local bankers and have more confidence that community banks can be more flexible with their needs than their larger counterparts. When community banks adopt new technologies that allow for digital banking, it allows customers the ability to bypass physically going into the bank’s branch, thus, putting them on the same playing field as national banks, regardless of their asset size and market share.
What Community Bank Marketing Looks Like
- Challenges to Marketing Community Banks
- Reaching Potential New Customers
- Common Opportunities for Community Bank Marketing
7 Community Bank Marketing Strategies
1) Email Advertising
2) Display and Retargeted Ads
3) Social Media Marketing
4) Personalized In-App Ads
5) SMS Text Ads
6) Local TV, Radio, and Billboards
7) Partnering with Relevant Businesses (Networking)
How Can DeepTarget Help with Community Bank Marketing?
- Finding Your Ideal Customer Persona
- Utilizing Business Intelligence to Drive Campaigns
- Our 3D StoryTeller and DXP Platforms
- Online and Mobile Banking Integration
Contact DeepTarget for More Information on Marketing For Community Banks
There are multiple marketing channels available to banks and multiple touchpoints to their customers and prospects. Being able to leverage several common marketing channels at once results in a highly competitive environment for community banks.
Selecting the right marketing channel, or a mix of marketing channels, is one of the easiest ways to provide a successful and profitable marketing strategy for your community bank. Meeting consumers “where they are” with your advertising helps to eliminate the media noise that customers are flooded with on a daily basis. Banks must also be cognizant of their customers’ journey and strive to “be with them” throughout their journey.
In the past, community banks had a competitive advantage based solely on their location. Their location made it convenient for customers to choose them over national banks who may not have had a branch in their area. But as digital banking intensifies, the line between the convenience of community banking and banking with a regional/national bank begins to blur.
The advent and advancement of “neobanks” (banks that operate exclusively online with no physical brick-and-mortar locations) brings even more competition for community banks. If community banks are not embracing digital marketing, they are at a severe handicap. Without adopting new trends in digital banking, customers are left inconvenienced, pressed to find other banks who better meet their needs with easily accessible digital applications.
Successful digital marketing campaigns effectively reach account holders, resulting in lead generation. The key benefits of digital marketing vs. traditional marketing are:
Email marketing is an affordable way to engage a target audience in order to create and expand brand recognition. Financial institutions can build stronger customer relationships with relevant content that serves their customers by customizing emails using data insights that are relevant to them. Customer or member data gathered from website engagement and internal information can be used to generate more relevant content and offers that go beyond marketing to dually serve as good customer service!
Retargeting, which serves a message to a group of users who have previously visited the site, is being utilized by banks to engage their customers. Using retargeting, customers will be reminded of the bank, and its services, and bring themselves back to the site to learn more.
Social media has been growing rapidly since its introduction. Not only is it a great channel for selling, but it is also instrumental in growing connections and relationships with prospective customers. Social media makes it easy to receive real-time feedback, allowing banks to make swift adjustments about messaging or tactics. It is also a very cost-effective method to provide customer service. Banks save more than 70% of costs in comparison with the traditional phone call approach to customer service. (Source: FinTech Futures)
Nurturing loyalty with customers is crucial for any bank. By creating targeted, personal communications across all channels, banks can develop confidence and loyalty between themselves and their customers. Messages that are meaningful and targeted increase user engagement by showing them content that pertains to them. This facilitates tailored customer experiences while building stronger relationships and loyalty. (Source: Marketing Evolution)
SMS messaging has one of the highest response rates of any marketing channel. It offers engaging content in a format that most smartphone users are highly familiar with and inclined to respond to quickly.
While we’ve focused on the importance of digital marketing for community banks, there are still many viable traditional marketing channels that local banks can leverage in order to reach customers.
Since community banks are geared to a particular geographic region, they can reach their local audience via TV, radio, and billboards. This allows them to focus on a defined geographical region where their customers reside.
Co-branding and partnering with local businesses help community banks attain a wider reach in their community. By joining efforts with trusted, local businesses who have the same values as the bank’s customers, they can showcase their commitment to small businesses which in turn gives them a better standing in their community.
Through a myriad of customer data and intelligence insights, DeepTarget can help take your
community bank to new heights through our integrated marketing solutions.
By utilizing consumer data insights, other business information, and AI, DeepTarget provides financial institutions with the ability to precisely target and personalize their digital marketing communications.
Financial institutions collect various types of information about their account holders. This information is provided securely by financial institution customers to the DeepTarget engine as one of the data sources used to enable accurate targeting of relevant communications in various digital channels.
The goal of DeepTarget’s marketing solutions is to help businesses effectively and affordably connect to their customers with personalized and targeted messaging. These solutions support companies in utilizing technology to develop comprehensive targeted marketing strategies that deliver tangible bottom-line results!
In order to effectively use targeted marketing, the right target audience must be found and intelligently separated into subsegments based on attributes like age, gender, marital status, family status, etc. Messages and visual presentations must then be designed that are targeted to each of those subsegments. Creating a visual presentation that is targeted to each segment will dramatically increase the odds that the target audience actually reads the message created for them and finds out how perfect our product is for them!
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have shown people how to capture and share great visual stories that entice, engage, and entertain their audience. 3D Story provides the digital experience for financial institutions to power customer engagement while delighting their users on all platforms.
Powered by DeepTarget, 3D Story drives more loan and deposit products through digital channels. The social media-inspired user experience is powered by data accumulated from years of customer service and can be enhanced with third-party sources. Meaningful messages are prioritized, inventoried, and delivered in an immersive 3D format that compels end-user engagement. Customers have a great visual experience and can quickly skip to content that interests them. Bank clients can seamlessly manage 3D Story as part of the DeepTarget Digital Experience Platform (DXP), both of which are patented technologies leading the way to facilitating digital excellence for banks of all sizes.
DeepTarget DXP is comprised of successful, intelligent solutions giving users one platform that easily integrates across all digital channels. DeepTarget DXP is an intelligent digital marketing and sales solution: a hosted app with an open API enabling financial institutions to engage and cross-sell to their customers from thousands of concurrent customer touch points, consistently and intelligently. Customer intelligence and automation make the platform easy to setup and deploy while macro and micro performance analytics provide deep insights that financial institutions can use to achieve optimum results from their campaigns. DXP delivers results by making the financial institution’s marketing smarter and easier than ever before!
In addition to our flagship services, DeepTarget also offers many additional marketing solutions for community banks.
DeepTarget online banking powers the financial institution’s online banking app with an intelligent marketing and sales platform to drive new leads and revenue. Utilizing customer and member intelligence, it helps target and personalize offers that drive outstanding results for the financial institution!
DeepTarget Mobile gives financial institutions the power to extend their marketing campaigns to the mobile banking environment and increase leads and income. With enhanced personalization capabilities, rule-based customer segmentation and targeting, and automated response and tracking tools, DeepTarget Mobile delivers exceptional targeted communication to increasingly mobile customers.
Email is a major channel for marketing today. According to industry sources, it outperforms all other media in terms of ROI and is a highly cost-effective communication tool. Experts suggest that the best results are obtained by:
The most successful banks and companies use the fast pace of technology to their advantage by ensuring that they stay on top of new developments in an ever-changing field. DeepTarget helps financial institutions grow by simplifying digital marketing to deliver amazing experiences that result in up to 10X more sales and lasting relationships with their digital users!
Artificial intelligence and machine learning power the personalization engine – and hundreds of financial institutions are seeing great results with it today. These multi-channel solutions for customer engagement and cross-selling are affordable for financial institutions of any size, easy to use, and feature rapid implementation!
See how your digital engagement and cross-selling can be transformed to drive new recurring profits from over 15 loan and
fee-based products and services. Try it out for yourself!
