It’s time to push the ‘reset’ button on bank marketing
Marketing as a discipline has totally reinvented itself over the past several years, from primarily a communications function to one that creates both value and revenue. Unfortunately, most bank and credit union marketing departments have not kept up with the same pace of change that we’ve seen in other industries, costing their institutions hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in hard costs and lost revenue opportunity.
The transformation of marketing has resulted from a confluence of three factors: consumer behavior, technology, and data analytics:
- The Consumer. Consumers have changed the way they learn about and buy financial products. Increasingly, they distrust advertising and prioritize web content and customer reviews they perceive as being more objective.
- Technology. Digital advertising allows sales tracking and the calculation of marketing ROI. Marketing automation allows more varied and rapidly deployed campaigns, enabling testing, learning, and optimization of spend. Both have conspired to transform marketing from an “expense” to be minimized to an investment which needs to be optimized. There is a reason GEICO spends much more in advertising than many of its competitors. (Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns GEICO, is not known for wasting money.)
