National banks have a strong physical and digital presence. They need no introduction, and customers already flock to them for their banking services.
In order for community banks, credit unions, and regional or multi-state banks to stand out in the financial industry, a strong emphasis on digital marketing is a must.
In this guide, I walk you through the key strategies in your digital marketing approach that will ensure you stand out to the customers in your area that you rely on.
What Does Digital Marketing Look Like in the Banking Industry?
Digital marketing spend tends to hover around 0.04% to 0.07% of a bank’s overall budget, which remains true regardless of the size of the bank.
The ABA Banking Journal’s bank marketing budget survey reveals that banks with less than $150 million in assets and banks with over $10 billion in assets spent around 0.05% of their budget on marketing, totalling $35,000 to $4,000,000, respectively.
Banks have spent increasingly more on new customer acquisition and advertising in the past year, according to digital marketing trends.
Around 37% of financial marketers have a budget for website enhancement and digital growth, and respondents revealed they’d be placing most of their marketing budget into digital advertising, social media, and SEO.
Diving further into the data, respondents revealed that their top three mediums producing the greatest returns were digital advertising, SEO, and social media, with content marketing and email marketing following closely behind.
Interestingly, few marketers planned to budget for AI financial marketing in 2024.
However, as I’ll illustrate below, catering to AI can bolster your digital marketing strategy and support your bank in a world that’s becoming increasingly reliant on the new tech.
Website and Mobile App Presence
Your financial digital marketing efforts will be for naught if you don’t have a high-quality website and mobile app for your customers to visit.
A high-quality website is an integral part of SEO and your broader digital campaign.
Websites that have an outdated look, load slowly, and are poorly laid out will make it difficult for Google to crawl your website and encourage visitors to seek out banking services elsewhere.
40% of users will abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
Investing in a modern website that is constructed for both search engines and users alike will foster trust with your target audience, ensure that they won’t abandon your site immediately, and enable you to boost conversions.
But what about mobile apps? One study conducted by Chase found that 90% of consumers preferred to manage their finances in one place, and two out of three consumers rely on their mobile banking apps heavily.
Mobile apps are non-negotiable in the digital banking age. Alongside your bank’s or credit union’s website, you need to have a well-made mobile app that enhances the customer experience and meets their needs.
This is especially true for digital bank marketing strategies.
PPC Ads
PPC ads are an integral part of digital marketing for banking industry.
Your digital marketing strategy should focus on two platforms: Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Why should your bank marketing focus go here? Google is the top search engine out there, which means that you can get eyes on your bank across all of their services, tapping into the Google Display Network as well for extensive brand awareness.
This means being able to appear on YouTube, Gmail, and over two million other websites in this Google ad network in your digital campaign.
Meanwhile, Facebook (which owns Instagram and offers the Meta Audience Network) can help you reach the mobile market, which will prove instrumental in your bank marketing strategy.
Marketers reported in 2023 that Facebook offered the highest ROI, with Instagram following close behind. Another statistic of note is that, when PPC ads are done right, they can produce $2 for every $1 spent.
If you want to increase your reach, PPC ads are one surefire way to enhance the efficacy of your digital marketing strategy.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to your online visibility in the digital landscape.
A good SEO strategy ensures that you appear to users who may be searching for your products or services organically.
Specifically, you want to make sure that you’re developing a strong local SEO strategy for your bank.
The first key focus is the Google Map Pack. If I were to search for “bank near me,” this would come up:
The Google Map Pack directs users to the nearest businesses related to their Google search.
How do you appear here?
Local SEO for banks begins with a strong Google Business Profile. Optimizing your Google Business Profile with accurate business information, high-quality photos, and customer reviews ensures you’re poised to appear at the top, getting in front of users.
While appearing on the Google Map Pack is important, local SEO doesn’t end there. You also want to make sure you’re appearing on SERPs.
When you work with a marketing agency for banks like GB Digital, we help you develop a content marketing strategy targeting longtail, local keywords that allow you to show up at the top of SERPS organically.
We also assist you with other elements of SEO that will be essential to your digital marketing strategy and go beyond content marketing, such as technical SEO and link building.
Get in touch with us to see how our digital marketing services can boost conversions and help your institution thrive.
Social Media Marketing
The number of social media users today is staggering.
There are an estimated 5.24 billion users across all social networks, and that number is from January of this year alone.
As you can imagine, that’s also a lot of potential customers you could reach if you were to focus on social media marketing within your banks marketing strategy.
Social media marketing requires testing to get it just right. You need to evaluate where your target audience spends their time, what type of content reaches them best, and gradually adjust your approach as you have more customer data coming in to understand customer behavior.
However, with the right digital strategy and mobile marketing approach, you can reach each potential customer with ease. As we can see from the PPC ads section, there are a lot of conversions to be driven from platforms like Facebook and Instagram alone.
You can even utilize influencer marketing alongside traditional marketing to cover all of your bases.
Video Marketing
Engaging with potential customers in multiple ways enables you to reach them in ways that capture their attention most.
While images and copy can do the trick, video marketing is another focus in your digital marketing strategy that can boost conversions for your bank and increase customer engagement.
89% of businesses currently use video marketing in their digital marketing strategy, and 93% of marketers reported that video marketing was a form of digital marketing that was providing them with a positive ROI.
Short-form videos tend to perform best, and product videos have shown great results in making it easier for customers to understand products and services.
In the banking industry, this can be beneficial for small banks with a niche financial product they’re hoping to market to a local audience.
If you’ve yet to make video content, investing in the right equipment or agency can give you additional ways to reach your ideal customers more effectively.
AI, AIO, and Chatbots
No matter what your opinion of AI might be, the reality of this new technology is that it’s here to stay. AI Overviews are a part of search results, and this can be leveraged to your advantage in your digital marketing campaign.
Here at GB Digital, we understand how to optimize for AI, ensuring that you appear as a source when people are making queries related to your products or banking services.
Between local SEO, Google Map Packs, and AI overviews, we can offer you the services and support you need to command attention on SERPs, no matter what might make an appearance first.
As a side note, AI can also be leveraged to bolster those in the banking sector in general. While AI may not have a wealth of applications yet, chatbots are one example of AI done right.
If you’re operating with limited support staff and are closed during the evenings, AI chatbots can field questions, provide resources, and help your customers when you’re unable to.
Being aware of popular and emerging technologies and learning how they can support your bank is necessary to remain competitive in the banking industry.
Elevate Your Digital Marketing Strategy and Boost Your Online Presence With Garit Boothe Digital
Are you struggling to see the online engagement and conversions your bank needs to be successful? GB Digital is the digital marketing agency that your institution demands!
With the right digital marketing support and SEO approach, we will boost your visibility, traffic, and engagement to bolster profits and create the right conditions for growth. Book your Discovery Call now to transform your digital marketing results!
