Local banks face marketing challenges due to strict regulations, competition, and offering similarity. To stand out, banks must craft an authentic brand story that highlights their mission, vision, values, and unique value propositions. This story should be reflected in leadership decisions, employee interactions, visual branding, and marketing strategies. By integrating storytelling into every customer touchpoint, banks can strengthen relationships, build trust, and differentiate themselves in a crowded market.
Local banks present their marketing teams with several challenges. In addition to the strict regulations governing what you can and can’t say and the billions spent on marketing by much larger competitors, most banking customers don’t understand what a bank does.
To most consumers in the personal banking market, and even some in the commercial banking market, “banking” is a big, amorphous thing that has something to do with money. Compounding that is the fact that most banks offer pretty much the same products and services. Outside of a few incentives or a unique feature here and there, Bank A’s checking accounts look an awful lot like Bank B’s.
In this market, it is absolutely vital that your bank tell an authentic story that’s both unique and engaging. Yours should be a story of how your bank builds relationships with customers, how you invest in your community, how you enable customers to navigate their finances more effectively, and—above all—what you do that nobody else does.
We’re here to share some thoughts and ideas on what makes a compelling bank story and how you can tell that story through every single piece of marketing you use.
What Goes Into My Bank’s Story?
Just about anything can be part of a bank’s story, but what we’re talking about here is your bank’s brand story. Most businesses outline their brand story in four statements:
- Mission Statement: What your bank strives to do every day and how you do it.
- Vision Statement: What your goals for your bank are in the extremely long term.
- Core Values: The guiding principles that define how you make decisions.
- Value Propositions: The things that make your bank valuable to your customers.
With those four pieces together, you have a broad and multifaceted story about a team of people working together to accomplish a short-term mission in pursuit of a longer-term vision.
How do I Write a Unique Story?
The first part of this mission is actually having a story to tell. If you already have well-thought-out mission, vision, and values statements and can easily name 2-3 value propositions that are genuinely unique to your bank, you’re well on your way.
If you don’t have these statements – or if they haven’t been re-examined or updated lately – then it’s time to start putting them together.
Our Definitive Guide to Branding provides a great short rundown of how to put together a cohesive and meaningful brand story. It’s a solid place to start if you’re trying to identify your unique mission, vision, and values. (You can also turn to the trusted experts at M&R Marketing for turnkey branding services, including brand story development.)
Once you know what your story is, it’s time to start telling it.
How to Market Your Story
Just having the story isn’t enough. You have to tell it – or at least part of it – in every interaction your brand has with a customer:
Your Team Tells the Story
Your bank’s best storytellers are the ones living the story every day: your employees. If your employees aren’t exemplifying your brand story all day, every day, then your story may not be what you think it is.
For instance, imagine your bank’s mission statement includes the phrase “…to deliver highly personalized service at every transaction…” But when you’re out on the floor, observing customer interactions, your team isn’t really doing that – they’re polite, but not making any effort to go beyond surface-level transactional engagement.
If that’s the case, you have a mission mismatch, and you need to do one of two things:
- Remind your team of their role in carrying out the mission.
- Alter your mission.
The single most important thing you can do to market your story isn’t to put it on your website or put a punchy slogan on a billboard: it’s cascading that brand story to your team and ensuring that they understand their role in living the story:
- Consistently demonstrating the benefits described in your value propositions
- Exemplifying your core values in every decision they make
- Carrying out the mission as written and in its entirety
- Basing 100% of their work on building towards the vision you cast for the company
If your team tells the story in those basic ways, you’re already well on your way to marketing your story effectively.
Your Leadership Tells the Story
The direction in which you steer your bank is another significant part of selling your brand story. If your mission requires you to offer detailed financial advice to every customer, you’d better have the advisers on staff to do the job.
This error is one of the biggest and most common pitfalls banks and other companies fall into: they tell a great story, but in the C-suite, things work differently. Banks promote highly individualized service but then outsource their call center overseas. They sell themselves on offering “accounts for any need,” but their offerings ignore a significant part of the community.
Just as your team needs to understand its role in telling the story, so too does your leadership. Every single top-level decision made by your bank’s leaders should be made with an eye to which option best aligns with the bank’s story. If the story is being lived in the C-suite, it will be apparent to both your team and your customers. If it isn’t, that will be pretty obvious, too.
Your Marketing Tells the Story
Of course, before they ever interact with your team, your audience needs to be told the story in a way that makes them want to explore your bank and, eventually, open an account or take out a loan.
There are dozens of ways to tell your story through your marketing, and each one has a very distinct role in letting your audience know what to expect from your bank:
Your Brand’s Visual Design
Your logo, colors, and other design elements should tell your bank’s story. If your story is one of an irreverent, tech-forward, customer-centered, youthful organization focused on changing the way banking is done, a logo that looks like it would have been at home on Wall Street in 1924 is not the way to go. Your brand design gives most people their first impression of what your story will sound like.
Your Brand Voice
Keeping with the example from above, do you think our youthful bank would do better with a tagline like “Solid and Dependable Banking From People You Trust” or with something like “Lines Suck. Bank Online Instead.”?
The very style and tone you use on your website, in your ads, on social media, and in your print collateral all tell your bank’s story. If your brand voice isn’t on-point, it will be immediately apparent to your audience. People can identify when a company’s marketing tone doesn’t match its reality, and their reaction to that is usually not good.
Review your written materials – do they really tell your story?
Your Marketing Strategy
When it comes to actually building out specific marketing pieces that tell your story, the work should really be happening in the strategy phase. After all, simply reciting your mission, vision, and core values isn’t effective marketing. So, you have to be able to tell the story in other ways.
As you’re building out each year’s marketing strategy, you should keep your brand story in mind throughout the entire process. As you’re making decisions about what marketing tactics will best help you meet your goals, keep these questions in mind:
- What part of our story is going to help us best meet this goal?
- What part of our story is going to resonate with the users on this specific platform?
- How does this marketing piece or campaign tell our story?
- Does this piece or campaign tell our story effectively?
If you’ve done this consistently throughout the strategy phase, you’ll find that you’ve developed a year’s worth of marketing pieces and campaigns that all tell some part of your bank’s brand story. Once your team is on board, you’ll be well on your way to a year of successful storytelling!
Partner With the Best Storytellers in the Business: M&R Marketing – 478-621-4491
Your bank’s story can be a real page-turner – and can really drive your growth. When you’re ready to see how your story can become the central, guiding force behind your marketing, we’re prepared to help you uncover and tell it! Call 478-621-4491 to speak with one of our business development managers today!
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