The promise of fintech can be exciting. It can improve both front and back offices. But bankers should use prudence when considering new technology.

Rick Hall, our Managing Director of the Banking and Financial Services practice at BKM Marketing, is a sought after expert for bank leaders who are looking to make investments in this area, particularly when it comes to investments in the area of digital marketing and communications.

Rick was recently published on BAI.org's Banking Strategies blog with some timely guidance to financial services firms about how best to go about making their next big investment in fintech. While every bank will have its own issues and needs, Rick outlines four questions every institution should be asking.

Topics: Direct Mail Marketing, Bank Marketing, Direct Marketing, Fintech, Marketing For Banks, Financial Marketing, Bank Merger, Bank Communications, Marketing Strategies, Strategic Marketing, Digital Marketing Agency, Small Business Marketing, Marketing For Financial Services

We are pleased to announce that BKM's very own Bruce McMeekin recently published some guest contributed content that we think our readers will want to hear more about. His post, USPS Is Changing the Way Brands Use Direct Mail — and It's Free was recently published to Target Marketing. As he explains in his article, "Direct mail already powers marketing results that provide a high ROI for savvy brands that use the medium wisely. And with the U.S. Postal Service’s recent launch of Informed Delivery, these results can become dramatically stronger, without adding a penny to direct mail campaign costs." Read more from Bruce's article on Target Marketing and learn how you can start taking advantage of Informed Delivery from the USPS in your own business.

Topics: Direct Mail Marketing, Bank Marketing, Direct Marketing, Marketing For Banks, Bank Merger, Marketing Strategies, Strategic Marketing, Digital Marketing Agency, Small Business Marketing, Marketing For Financial Services, Target Marketing

The path to increasing sales starts with effective customer and prospect engagement.

Here are six steps you can take to help understand and enhance connections with your audience, as recently published in MarTech Advisor by Bruce McMeekin, BKM Marketing’s Founder and CEO.

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6 Steps to Understand and Connect With Your Audience

Understanding how brands can engage consumers is critical to success. Here are six steps marketers can take to help them understand and connect better with their audience, says, Bruce McMeekin, Founder and CEO, BKM Marketing.

Topics: Direct Mail Marketing, Bank Marketing, Direct Marketing, Marketing For Banks, Financial Marketing, Bank Communications, Marketing Strategies, Strategic Marketing, Digital Marketing Agency, Small Business Marketing, Marketing For Financial Services, MarTech Advisor

The rate of technology change facing Banks and Credit Unions today is unprecedented.  At the same time, the challenges facing prioritization for selecting from these solutions is more critical than ever before for the industry.  In a recently published article in International Banker: Find the Perfect Tech Fit for Your Bank by Asking Vendors These 9 Questions, BKM Marketing’s Managing Director of Banking and Financial Services, Rick Hall, looks at approaches to leverage an institution’s strategy to navigate this reality.

Topics: Bank Marketing, Direct Marketing, Fintech, Marketing For Banks, Financial Marketing, Bank Merger, Bank Communications, Marketing Strategies, Strategic Marketing, Digital Marketing Agency, Small Business Marketing, Marketing For Financial Services, International Banker

Federal regulators are becoming more and more receptive to large bank deals — bank merger approvals have sped up under the Trump administration. As the landscape resets to include larger combinations, the financial rationale is dependent upon combining institutions exploring and addressing the needs of all constituents impacted by these mergers.

Topics: Direct Mail Marketing, Bank Marketing, Direct Marketing, Marketing For Banks, Financial Marketing, Bank Merger, Bank Communications, Marketing Strategies, Strategic Marketing, Digital Marketing Agency, Marketing For Financial Services, Bank Merger Marketing, International Banker

Savvy marketers are discovering that direct mail is more powerful than ever, especially when they're microtargeting new customers and building deeper relationships with existing customers. Email, robocalls, social media, and many other techniques have their strengths, but cluttered messaging channels render many such approaches unemotional and ineffective.

Topics: Direct Mail Marketing, Bank Marketing, Direct Marketing, Marketing For Banks, Financial Marketing, Bank Communications, Marketing Strategies, Strategic Marketing, Digital Marketing Agency, Marketing For Financial Services, Forbes

“Customer journey” has already become one of financial marketing’s most popular buzzwords of the year. It seems you can’t have a conversation about banking, read a marketing strategy document or sit through a marketing presentation for senior management without hearing the term…along with disparate views as to what it means.

But here’s the problem with buzzwords: too many people spend more time bandying about a phrase like “customer journey” than doing the hard but fruitful work of actually deploying end-to-end initiatives to deliver the journey your customers desire. To really demonstrate your understanding of the customer journey, you have to dig in and be prepared to make some significant changes to the way your institution engages customers – across every channel they access.

Topics: Bank Marketing

Those turning leaves mean it’s planning season

On one hand, 2016 has flown by – early signs of leaves changing colors here in New England coupled with debates on the validity of the Farmer’s Almanac forecast for the upcoming winter. On the other hand, it is hard not to feel like the past 10 months have provided a grueling set of body blows to the industry: CFPB, phantom cross-selling, Fintech, tight margins and risk management. These realities paired with other priorities now need to be gathered and organized to make sense of where we go from here.

Welcome to strategic planning season.

Topics: Bank Marketing

During a week where the banking news cycle felt an awful lot like the current presidential campaign - with provocative coverage of items like the a cross-sell fiasco, calls for investigation and questions of who knew what and when did they know it - a really interesting, and potentially foreshadowing event took place in the industry.

It isn’t all that surprising that more negative stories commanded the headlines - as with the campaign - but this one caught our attention (and it wasn’t because of a cool Fintech rollout).

 

When was the last time a bank product flew off the shelf like the Chase Sapphire Reserve card?

We briefly highlighted the story in our most recent post highlighting the content marketing of 15 banks over a one-week period.  The card's popularity alone is newsworthy...but add to that the fact that Chase hasn't spent a dime on marketing the card. This really is a defining, viral 'gotta have one' moment for a bank product.

Topics: Bank Marketing

A one-week snapshot of bank content marketing activity

Last week we posted that we were looking at the actual ‘what’ behind a random sampling of fifteen banks' social marketing efforts, specifically reviewing the industry's top used social media platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

As a refresh, the fifteen banks we observed were evenly divided into three segments:

• Five traditional national and super regional US banks 
• Five traditional community and regional US banks (generally under $10 billion in assets); and
• Five non-traditional banks (virtual banks with no branches)

Again, we know this isn’t a scientific study (by the way, we don’t have dozens of interns around to surf sites and log activity – we did the work ourselves) and that the timing around Labor Day wasn’t picked for its height of social media activity levels. But even so, we found some trends that were at least interesting to us – and hopefully some of you as well.

So what did we observe from the social and content marketing efforts of 15 banks? 

Topics: Bank Marketing, Direct Marketing