With fiscal year 2024 coming to a close, community banks, credit unions, and financial brands are looking ahead to determine how best to make use of often tight budgets. Many are working backwards from bigger-picture strategic priorities heading into (hopefully) more favorable rate environments and potentially less certain market conditions. At the same time, innovative AI tools are proving to be particularly disruptive. As is often the case, sales, marketing, and leadership teams will need to prioritize the areas that offer the most bang for their buck. Wondering where and how your budget and strategy can maximize every dollar to attract more customers, grow commercial lines, increase deposits, and grow lending programs? Here’s what financial brands are prioritizing in marketing budgets in the year ahead.
Digital Listings & Local SEO
No doubt about it: Sales and marketing teams are looking for ways to reach and engage more existing and potential customers across all lines of business. The first step is to be discoverable–that is, to be easy to find. With consumers increasingly relying on online searches (think: “coffee shop near me”) and map-based services to find offerings that range from mortgage loans to business accounts and from small business loans to options for working capital, marketing teams at community banks, credit unions, and financial brands are prioritizing digital listings management and online business profiles more than ever.
Having accurate, up-to-date information across Google, Yelp, and other search engines and online directories is crucial. Managing these listings ensures consistency, boosts local SEO, and helps maintain compliance and credibility by ensuring information is accurate and remains accurate. What’s more, claimed and well-managed online listings and business profiles pave the way for positive customer reviews–further enhancing your online presence, helping your website and brand reach and attract more customers, and generally increasing leads and business. In short, claiming and managing your listings is a crucial first step for broader goals like generating customer reviews, increasing website traffic (and things like online account opens and applications), and investing in paid digital marketing.
Paid Social Campaigns that Actually Work
Social media can be a powerful tool for reaching the right people with the right message at the right time. For specific initiatives like account opens, loan originations, deposit growth, commercial account growth–there are hugely effective ways to reach specific audiences through strategic campaigns and audience targeting across social media platforms.
“Frankly, everyone is on social,” says Social Assurance’s Client Services Manager Jess Doerr, whose team works with banks, credit unions, and financial brands across the U.S. to execute content, campaigns, and paid budgets. “Whether you’re on a shoe-string budget or have a little more room, social is a key piece of the marketing mix because of the targeted exposure it can provide,” she adds, noting the importance of organizing campaigns around specific outcomes and designing effective creative. “Of course, there are also compliance considerations to keep in mind,” she says, emphasizing the importance of working with a partner who specifically understands banking and financial services.
Saving Time & Resources with Better Workflows
Marketing content and sales enablement materials can require input, coordination, execution, and approval from different individuals and departments, making it especially important to have clearly defined systems, processes, and workflows in place. What’s more, compliance requirements can make documentation and record-keeping a burden. One specific area of focus for financial brands in the year ahead is better overall organization around the management of content and marketing across teams and channels. That means better content planning, better task management, clear accountability and delegation, and processes that make all these goals and steps easier to track and manage in general.
Banks are increasingly investing in systems and processes that streamline workflows, saving time and resources by breaking down internal silos and improving operational efficiencies. Adopting more integrated platforms, enables better communication and collaboration across both individuals and departments, reducing redundancy and manual tasks. These enhanced workflows ensure teams can focus on high-priority tasks without getting bogged down in unnecessary complexity. They also make it easier for mid- and senior-level marketers to delegate.
Mobilizing Lenders & Business Development Teams
Ahead of potentially more favorable rate environments, FIs are allocating budget toward lending–both consumer and business lending. Importantly, this means mobilizing lending teams, especially on digital and social media–where they can build their personal brands as an extension of yours. The right systems and processes can make it super easy for individual lenders to utilize and distribute authentic and effective social media content.
Organizations are allocating dollars to key first steps like whipping lenders’ social media profiles into shape, ensuring accurate and well-managed digital listings for high-profile lenders (where applicable), and providing social media content they can personalize and publish. Systems for ensuring content stays organized and is approved and overseen by marketing and compliance teams (without over-burdening them) are an especially important piece of the puzzle.
In short, these tools allow lenders to build relationships, share relevant content, and generate leads online, tapping into the vast reach of social platforms. At the same time, compliance and content management systems ensure that all communications are consistent with regulatory standards (and brand standards!), safeguarding the institution’s reputation. This balance of empowerment and control helps drive sales growth in a way that is on-brand and compliant.
Strategic & Consistent Social Media Content
It’s more important than ever for brands to have a cohesive, effective social media presence. It signals reach, credibility, and connectedness in local communities who actively follow and engage with branded pages. It also helps ensure that employees, ambassadors, partners, and others who have branded pages with significant followings have a brand to tag and link in co-branded content–furthering your reach and keeping your organization top-of-mind.
The first step for brands on social media is to have a consistent, credible presence on one or more platforms. From there, turn focus to building an audience of people who like and follow your page–and thus can see and share your organic content. Growing your audience will help increase reach and, keep in mind that, followers beget more followers. Run campaigns to help grow your audience, then you can start to think strategically about how you use marketing dollars to advance certain messages, products, services, educational content, and storytelling pieces. Balancing community content, relatable storytelling, partner content, highlights from and about employees and customers, give-back initiatives, and other types of content keeps your page interesting and authentic–making your audience more likely to engage. Of course, social content and active management across multiple pages can be a challenge. Keep in mind that Social Assurance is here to help. We launch pages, handle custom-branded content, run campaigns, and offer other content and marketing services aimed at ensuring you’re getting the most out of these high-opportunity channels.
Take the Next Steps
What’s on your plate for 2025? If you’re looking ahead at strategic priorities and eager to maximize your budget, team, and other resources–it can be helpful to think through where you stand on core marketing channels and strategies and where your team might need to allocate budget, time, or both. Interested in connecting on your 2025 goals? Reach out!
