How to Move Every Line Item in Marketing from Expense to High-Return Investment

I believe most everything in life should carry its own weight.

In this session, I’ll show you how to create massive ROI from every marketing dollar AND know how to prove it!

If you’re the kind of leader who is rubber-stamping a marketing budget that has a few tweaks from the year before and you’re are wondering if any of your marketing is actually getting a result, you’ll love this session because I’ll show you some proven research that you can use right away to improve results.

If, on the other hand, you know the ROI from each line item on your marketing budget, good for you! AND, you’re going to love what I’m going to share today because you’ll be able to implement it immediately to get even better results and bigger ROI.

And, if you are pretty sure your marketing team is doing a great job, but you’d like to prove it because, well, you ARE a banker and you understand the need for profit, stick around—I’ve got you covered.

Turning marketing from the “expense” category to the “investment” category won’t happen automatically. There are some challenges:

1. Most marketers haven’t been shown how to create an ROI from marketing. In fact, marketing schools STILL aren’t teaching it right. “Getting your name out there” isn’t nearly enough to create ROI.
2. They often don’t know how to track and analyze ROI. (It’s just not taught.)
3. They’re usually just repeating what has been done before, instead of exploring what CAN be done to drive real profit. (Hint: It’s about connecting with the right customers exactly, not blanketing the whole market.)

EVERY bank is facing these challenges.

The good news is that today, I’m giving you four steps that will make your results dramatically better in a few weeks.

Step 1: Focus on high-profit prospects (Crazy, I know!)

UNLIKE so many expensive and low results marketing programs that are focused on any old prospect, yours needs to get aligned with new national research that shows that your best return on investment is from investing in your own team’s development first (they’re the number one touchpoint with prospects).

Then, focus on your current customers. Get more of the relationship from your best customers. (Yes, that’s marketing’s job, too.) Finally, look outside to new prospects. Most banks only focus on getting new customers, but that’s the hardest and most expensive way to add profits.

Step 2: Define your “Moments of Truth” and WOW your customers

Look, I get it—it’s exciting to win new accounts, and you need that. But first, make sure that every employee is hitting every customer service moment of truth AND that they know how to turn every inquiry into a full relationship.

IF they don’t know how to do that, what good is the advertising?

Step 3: Stop lighting your money on fire with profitless “branding.”

Instead of wasting money on “branding”—which is a low ROI marketing approach—create a plan to transform the client experience so that you get the full relationship. Honestly, most banks are awful at getting more than two or three pieces of business from any single customer. (The national average is 2.2 accounts per customer, when the customers have, on average, 16 financial accounts—go get them!)

Build a systematic sales process that never feels like sales and that your employees love because they feel they’re helping people—not selling. (At our next live event, I’ll be teaching the seven-step simple sales system that our clients use. It’ll get even the timidest employee in the bank to enthusiastically—and effectively—bringing in business, without being salesy.)

Step 4: Ok, now go get “new money.”

Once you’ve fixed the holes in the bucket—the “average” customer service experiences, and the inability of your people to be able to uniformly average six cross-sales on new accounts—then go after new accounts.

That’s the process of marketing optimization—optimize for all the low-hanging fruit first, then go get new customers. You’ll multiply the profitability of those new customers when you do this in the right order.

Again, four steps.

1. Make sure your marketing team knows to allocate most of their budget to optimize the client experience, then to market to your best customers to win the whole relationship, and finally to your Top 1,000 prospects.
2. Make sure they know that it’s their job to fix the culture and make sure that your mystery shopping scores average over nine—and that that mystery shopping includes making sure they can convert the conversation from rate to value.
3. Get the cross-sales on new accounts to average over six—that means your team is starting to help your current clients buy what they need.
4. Now you’ve earned the right to start promoting to your Top 100 and Top 1000 prospects.

By doing this, you can create a safe and prosperous bank—one that will continue to be there in your community and avoid ever having to lay off or freeze salaries when the economy gets tough because you’ve created a predictable success machine.

Make sure you tune in next time where I’ll show you why it’s a primary role of marketing to transform the experience of clients—AND how to do it.