I believe that people want to work with people who “get them” and are all about their success.

In this series, I’m going to show you how you can transform the ROI from your marketing dollars so that every dollar you put in gives you far more than 5 to 20 back to your bottom line.

If you feel like your marketing department is already targeting the very best low-risk, high-profit prospects—and getting them—you’ll love this series, because I’ll show you how to speed that up.

However, your marketing people may be fabulous but still doing the things they learned in marketing school. It’s not their fault—they haven’t had the education on how, if you’re a typical community bank, anywhere from 50-120% of your bottom line comes from your Top 100 customers, and what to do about that. If that’s your bank, you’re going to be tickled, because I’ll show you how to optimize their hard work.

Or maybe you are somewhere in the middle. You think maybe half of your marketing is returning a positive ROI, but you can’t explicitly prove which half and how much. Well, this is your lucky day, because you are going to discover that there is a fresh new world of marketing that really delivers.

There are a few recurring challenges almost every bank faces with getting and demonstrating ROI from their marketing budget.

First, there is no good system to prove what exactly is working. Second, your marketing people are being judged by the board and employees about how much “stuff” is visible—on radio, TV, etc.—but most of the things that are about visibility are proven to have a (substantial) negative ROI. Also, most marketers are doing what they learned in marketing school or doing what the people before them did. They have very little understanding that traditional marketing rarely moves the profit and safety needles. Again, it’s not their fault—they just haven’t been exposed.

Just know, you’re not alone on this—it’s everywhere.

I’m now going to give you three steps to help your marketing team create what your board and stockholders want—increased NIM, lower efficiency ratio and more fee income—making your bank more sound and stable.

• Step 1: Many marketing “projects,” like branding, brand awareness and rate advertising, create one outcome that is guaranteed every time—less profit. You want to get your team to understand that since your Top 100 customers account for 50-120% of your profits, it’s full court press to get 100 more just like them.
• Step 2: Once you’ve identified the psychographics and firmographics of your 100 most profitable customers, it is their job to build reputational equity with those people. It should never be mass marketing—it should instead feel like a one-to-one conversation that is all about each prospect.
• Step 3: Seriously consider dropping all traditional advertising. Okay, you can wait until this is a proven concept. One CEO told me he thought I was nuts when I told him he could cut the marketing budget by 80% and double marketing results in one year. He only told me about it a year later when he called to say that it worked. I get it… it’s hard to let go of what you is working until you see proof that something else works.

So, three steps. First, put everything that can’t prove ROI on trial for its life. Second, identify and then kiss The top 100 prospects on the lips until they chap. Third, take the things that can’t prove ROI—those that aren’t direct response marketing where you know exactly what they are responding to—and say goodbye, as you reap the rewards of a marketing machine designed to win.

By creating a marketing “franchise” system that produces a predictable improvement of more profit with less risk, you can sleep well at night knowing that your bank is safe and will be around a long time.

Make sure you tune in for the next episode. I’ll share with you the research about the highest ROI investments you can make in marketing, their ideal order, and what to do about them.