The Great Exchange

As I posted earlier, we spent the first few days of this week in Orlando as participants at Americas Community Bankers Great Exchange Conference. The conference was great, and I would like to thank all of those that we met, talked to and shared ideas with during the conference.

While we were involved in two presentations: “How to Differentiate Your Bank” and “Life-Cycle Marketing,” perhaps the most interesting session we participated in was Tuesday’s peer group session, where we discussed three issues that attendees identified as most pressing to them. While a majority of the people in the room held marketing positions – these most pressing issues extend well beyond marketing, and are issues that many institutions across the country are currently facing:

Attracting Younger Customers
Many community banks are faced with an aging customer base; and, as a result are under pressure to attract younger customers to feed the new customer pipeline. I found it interesting that people in the session couldn’t understand why the younger generations would be attractive targets. Their reasons included everything from low incomes to irresponsibility; but, these are pretty big generalizations, and if younger generations aren’t targeted in some capacity, who’s next in line? It’s critical that community banks first realize the importance of targeting the younger demographic segments and follow that with the development of an aggressive strategy – which has implications well beyond the marketing department.

Growing Core Deposits
We have heard this one before – and growing core deposits will continue to be an issue for community banks. Especially in the wake of investment firms like Edward Jones and Charles Schwab continuing to market themselves more aggressively to a wider audience. As with most industry-wide issues, there is not a universal answer here. Real sustainable growth in deposits is more likely to come as you communicate and deliver a real value to your customer – and move away from rate or product driven promotions. And, growing core deposits requires a thorough understanding of your market, the potential within your market and, ultimately, a strategy for achieving that potential.

Training Your CEO
We found this issue to be one of the more interesting issues to arise in conversation – but, once again, the room was largely those in marketing positions; and it’s been our experience that there is usually a disconnect between marketing personnel and the CEOs of financial institutions. So, we discussed ways for marketing heads to better communicate the value of marketing to their CEOs who, in many cases, think of marketing as too “touchy feely.” Some of the more convincing ideas involved discussions of best vs. worst case scenarios, and conducting thorough research into costs and projected ROI before presenting ideas for approval.

Overall, the conference seemed to be a success. I would like to invite anyone to share their thoughts, ideas and comments about the conference right here. And, as always, if you have any questions about our sessions during the conference, please feel free to email me at bwalen@formarketinsights.com.