The banking industry is battling inflated cost per acquisition. While your competitors may be shying away from rising costs, it’s important that you maintain consistent marketing investment to stay ahead. Pulling back on your marketing not only means that you limit your perception in the public consciousness, but you’ll have to work twice as hard to regain your footing when you boost your marketing efforts again.
Consistent marketing can help build and maintain brand recognition, which is top-of-mind for an industry that hinges on trust and reliability. This visibility also offers opportunities to invest in audience modeling and customer insights, allowing you to improve service for current customers while attracting new ones.
Banks that consistently invest in their marketing efforts build and maintain a strategic advantage over competitors that pull back on investment. We’ll explore how to understand your current marketing contributions, improve your audience acquisition, and the tactics you can use to make sure your messaging is reaching your next best customer.
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Reevaluate your marketing channel breakdown
If you want to acutely understand and target the channels where you have room to grow, you first must understand what your current marketing allocations are netting you. With growing data and messaging fragmentation across channels, a meticulous approach to tracking your marketing expenditure can significantly impact your bank’s marketing performance.
Reassess which channels, campaigns, and strategies are generating the best returns. Understanding the distribution of marketing spend helps your financial institution avoid overspending in areas and channels that are negatively impacting your acquisition cost.
Tapping into predictive modeling can help you identify your best channels and ideal customer segments. Investing in marketing mix modeling can help you gain accurate insight into channel contribution and efficiently allocate your budget. Forecasting your future marketing mix can help you make data-driven decisions and lay out a sustainable growth strategy.
Dig into your customer acquisition costs
Understanding and managing acquisition costs is crucial to optimize marketing investments and ensure sustainable growth. Using marketing mix modeling to understand how each channel enables more effective marketing budget allocation and maximizes your ROI while keeping your CPA in check.
Using these tactics, many Amsive regional banking clients have seen CPAs lower than $350, 60% below the average regional bank CPA of $868. Understanding your acquisition costs will allow for more precise targeting and segmentation. You can assess which customer segments will provide the highest customer lifetime value and improve your marketing mix and targeting. This can also help you balance short-term wins and long-term profitability.
Reallocate your marketing spend
Once you’ve identified areas of inefficient ROMIs, bloated acquisition costs, or overspend, the urge to pull back on investment may rear its ugly head again. Rather than shifting the budget out of marketing entirely, reallocate that investment into channels that have more efficient CPA.
For example, if your data shows a higher CPA and lower overall acquisition through social media, rebucket those funds toward traditionally higher-performing channels, such as TV, print, or OOH. This adjustment can help you capitalize on your visibility and success while freeing up space for innovation in analytics and targeting.
Invest in testing and audience modeling
It’s essential to set aside a portion of your marketing budget for testing and investing in the future. Whether it’s to invest in marketing mix modeling or to explore audience identification and segmentation, it’s essential for regional banking institutions that you test targeting younger generations and emerging channels. Testing and modeling will also allow many clients to only target 50% of the population, but capture +80% of the responders.
For example, designate 20% of your budget to iterate and get in front of audiences that your competitors haven’t explored. Use the remaining 80% of your budget to support existing, proven strategies that have historically delivered your desired KPIs.
Tap into under-explored audiences
FinTech has capitalized on speaking to audiences that traditional banking institutions typically ignore, while traditional banking giants are now actively targeting the affluent minority of customers. 12.3% of Americans make between $75,000 and $99,999, and nearly 27% make over $100,000. That leaves almost 60% of the population out in the cold, and countless outreach and upsell opportunities left on the table. The average Gen Zer, a large part of this audience segment, is increasing their buying power and is often overlooked by large and regional banking institutions alike.
Regional banks can focus on underserved markets, focusing on consumers who are often overlooked by larger banks. They represent a significant portion of the population, forming a substantial audience segment. By targeting these customers, regional banks can build a robust and stable customer base, creating long-term profitability and consumer loyalty.
The suite of traditional products, such as checking and savings accounts, accessible credit options, and affordable loans can entice the average bank customer that’s looking for a reliable, local banking institution. When regional banks offer financial services to median-income earners in their area, they also allow for greater consumer spending and investment within that community and help build brand recognition among a wider local demographic.
Invest in brand building and visibility
I know we’ve been discussing banking, but think about the insurance industry for a moment. How many companies come to mind, right off the top of your head? Two? Three? Now think about their marketing. How many mascots can you remember? How many jingles?
Now think about the banks in your area. Do any jingles come to mind? Any mascots?
If you, like me, just went, Liberty, liberty, liberty! Or, We are farmers! to yourself, and then drew a marketing memory blank on the banking side, then you and I understand the same thing: Traditional banking has a visibility problem.
Insurance isn’t the most interesting of industries (my apologies to any insurance marketers who happen to be reading this), but their marketing makes a sometimes-onerous industry a little more fun to engage with.
So, how can we take that concept and move it over to banking? I’m not recommending creating a Clippy-esque mascot out of a dollar sign (though, now that I think about it, not the worst idea in the world), but you should be investing in the channels and tactics that will improve your brand visibility and recognition.
There is no one more qualified to highlight what is unique and special about your bank and offerings as you are. Use the information gleaned from your audience testing to combine your offers and known audiences with marketing channels that allow for greater storytelling, like CTV and audio ads.
In a recent conversion lift study, an Amsive regional banking client saw an over 150% lift in checking account completes when exposed to CTV first. Building a picture for your audience demonstrates who they could be when they bank with you, and the support and attention that they would receive from you.
Create marketing results that you can bank on
As you adjust your strategy to lower CPA bloat, strategically maintaining investment in your marketing is vital. Shifting or pulling back your marketing efforts can not only lead to diminished brand visibility, but also increase the effort required to regain lost ground later. Consistent and strategic marketing investment helps your bank build regional brand recognition and trust—key elements in an industry that relies on maintaining your consumer’s attention and confidence.
By reallocating resources to highlight high-visibility and high-return channels, you can maintain a strategic advantage over your competitors, and achieve sustainable growth and control your overall CPA.
Curious about how to reach Gen Zers as they expand their buying power? Explore how you can tap into this consumer segment that’s often ignored by traditional banking institutions, or let’s talk about achieving more for your marketing—and your business.
