Digital marketing for community banks is more essential now than ever. However, many small banks are still struggling with staying up to date with the latest and most effective digital marketing trends in banking. As a result, community banks must focus on using the power of digital channels to expand their marketing efforts. The following are five trends that will help with your digital marketing strategies:
1. Adopt unique approaches
Digital marketing is not just about spending and increasing efforts across platforms. For small banks with limited budgets, it’s about developing unique approaches to stand out. Some ways to stand out are highlighting customers and success stories, driving value through marketing offerings, and using non-traditional awareness campaigns rather than repetitive ads.
2. Leverage chatbots as customer service contact points
In recent years, live chat technology has been one of the essential additions to the customer service toolbox. It allows banks to meet the changing demands of customers who, nowadays, won’t settle for waiting. Consumers want answers quickly and often without picking up the phone and dialing. Chat and chatbots in banking that integrate with social media, websites, and apps, make it easy for customers to ask questions and receive the help they need with minimal effort. It’s essential to offer 24/7 chat services with a sophisticated chatbot in-line. Here, you can offer services such as opening accounts, checking account status, and information about products.
3. Define your niche market for segmentation and personalization
Most community banks have transaction data, which allows community banks to take a closer look at individual customers within each segment. Customers with seemingly identical demographics may be quite different upon closer inspection. Bank data will help your bank define the profiles of the ideal audiences you want to engage with and target them by leveraging audience behavior. For example, you can target new homeowners living in a 25-mile radius around branch offices with social media ads about new home insurance products.
4. Integrate search optimization into digital marketing
Search optimization is necessary for any digital marketing strategy to grow the customer base. SEO methodologies and best practices will improve your bank’s website relevance, accessibility, and visibility in search engine page results. Optimizing your website for end users will help visitors find the information they need. Your website must have easy-to-find details, and the content must align with what your end users search for on their favorite search engines. Remember, your digital marketing content must be fully optimized to appear in mobile search, through voice searches, and sometimes through a combination of the two.
5. Focus on customer engagement and experience
With 24/7 service, the ability to easily change banks, and easily compare what banks are offering at a granular level, banks must provide more, focusing on customer experience. Implementing a digital customer engagement strategy will keep you and your team on track, and ensure that your customers receive streamlined, consistent service throughout their journey. Customers want to be treated as humans. That means that generic digital marketing tactics will not work. When customizing content or support to an individual customer, you must be well informed about their specific habits. Personalized content marketing is a great way to drive engagement by providing customers with valuable blog posts, text messaging, videos, etc., relevant to them.
Conclusion
Your bank should focus on foundational digital marketing, emphasizing improved customer experience with more personalization and adaptable services to increase user satisfaction. Digital marketing helps you identify the right content for your customers by combining your data, with campaign data, to lead to smarter marketing decisions.
Key Takeaways
- Adapt unique approaches
- Leverage chatbots as customer service contact points
- Define your niche market for segmentation and personalization
- Integrate search optimization into digital marketing
- Focus on customer engagement and experience
