Three Marketing Strategies for Community Banks

Marketing teams at community banks can often feel like they are being pulled in multiple directions at once. You’re often tasked with too many projects and not enough resources to accomplish them. In order to make the most of your marketing budget, you need to focus on the core marketing strategies that align to a common goal and tight budget.

Here are three cost-effective marketing strategies for community banks:

Convert customers into advocates

Your existing customers can be your greatest marketing asset if you know how to leverage them properly. Integrating an annual or biannual referral program for your most loyal customers will help your community bank grow at a word-of-mouth level. This is great for online reputation management, too, if you ask them to leave positive reviews for your bank on Yelp and elsewhere. Word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool today and is especially powerful when dealing with matters as personal as banking.

Produce more website content

Optimizing your community bank website for search marketing will help drive local web traffic to your website. Content marketing is a great way to boost sales and upgrades for more traditional businesses, and you can use that approach when blogging about banking. Your rank on the search engine results pages depends on the quality of the content on your website. A few ways to improve your search rank include producing more high-quality and engaging content for your website, link building to your website from outside sources, and optimizing your site according to Google’s search engine optimization guidelines.

Engage on Social Media

Social media can help you better execute the two strategies mentioned above as well as accomplish its own goals. However, you're setting yourself up to fail if your business social media strategy is not well executed or forgotten about. When it comes down to getting the most bang for your buck in paid social media marketing, Facebook is the go-to. Facebook maintains a bigger user base as well as more data on their users than any other social network. However, that’s not to discount other social networks’ abilities to improve your inbound marketing strategy.

Community banks are restricted in the number of resources they have available for marketing efforts.