Bank Marketing Show

A tornado. A big event coming to town. A system outage. A competitor getting acquired. Sooner or later, something unexpected happens, and everyone at the bank is asking, "How do we get the word out?" Most banks don't have a plan for these moments.

In this episode, Dan and Chris walk through marketing's role when the unexpected happens. Positive or negative, you need to think through the practical questions: who decides what to say, who approves it, where to say it, and what your response says about your brand. How you show up is one big way your bank builds trust, and saying nothing can destroy trust fast.

• What kind of plan you should have for unexpected events, and what belongs in it

• Matching the channel to the moment: what earns a red alert banner vs. a social post vs. a sign at the drive-up

• The campaigns you forgot were running: why your scheduled posts and digital ads need a look before anything goes out

• How one bank became its town's news source after a tornado, and why staying silent might be the riskiest move of all

• Want to talk through building your bank's response plan? Reach out: [email protected]

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

The headlines say 65% of marketing jobs won't survive AI. The same kind of headlines many years ago said ATMs would kill the teller. What actually happens is different: the job survives, but the job description doesn't.

Dan and Chris look a few years down the road at what the average community bank marketing department will look like — what work disappears, what takes its place, and why community banks come out of this shift with a bigger advantage than they went in with. The big banks will automate everything and sound like it. The community bank marketer who pairs AI leverage with genuine local presence ends up more differentiated, not less. But only if you start building the muscles now.

• What disappears from the marketer's plate, but why it doesn't necessarily mean jobs disappearing at community banks

• What fills the space: the work that actually differentiates a bank, and the internal role most marketers haven't stepped into yet

• Why niching finally becomes practical for banks that could never justify the content lift before

• A simple homework assignment to find out what you could hand off this month

• Watch our AI webinar and related episodes at bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

• Contact: [email protected]

Every community banker says some version of the same thing: "If we could just get them into the lobby, we'd win them over." And they're right — the in-person experience is the community bank superpower. But customers touch your bank digitally more than ten times for every one time they walk through the door. If your website reads like a rate sheet and your social feed is a bulletin board, they'll never want to visit your lobby.

Dan and Chris pull together a lot of threads from this year — AI, competitive analysis, social, the website-as-brochure problem — around one question: if someone only knew your bank from its digital presence, would they recognize it when they walked in? Your best CSR wouldn't hard-sell a mortgage customer on a checking account. Your digital channels and homepage shouldn't either, they should connect with them as a human.

• A question every bank marketing team should ask about their digital presence

• A practical way to use AI to find the user experience gaps you're too close to see

• How to use what your branch staff knows about greeting customers, to help shape your website

• The thing your bigger competitors can't replicate, and how to make it the heart of your digital presence

• Want to brainstorm your digital experience or hear best practices from other banks? Reach out: [email protected]

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

We've looked at and designed hundreds of bank websites over the years, and 9 out of 10 – maybe even 9.9 out of 10 - lead with products. "Here are our accounts." "We're a better option." "Here are our rates." They're digital brochures — and they all say the same thing.

Nobody wakes up wanting a checking account. They want to stop paying fees, save for a house, or grow a business without losing their local banking relationship. In this episode, Dan and Chris make the case that the fix doesn't need to involve a new from-scratch website, you just need to reframe your copy and content. Lead with the customer's problem, not your product's features. The product details still matter, but they're not the hook.

• The difference between leading with your product and leading with your customer's problem

• How to rewrite a product page without a redesign, and how even a few sentences above the feature table can change everything

• Why this matters even more now that AI is answering customer questions

• Want help with a competitive analysis or AI visibility project? Reach out: [email protected]

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

Scroll through any community bank's social feed. You'll find rate posts, holiday closures, "we're hiring," and the occasional stock photo with a tagline. But one thing you usually won't find is high post engagement, because there's not much to engage with. Most banks do the media part of social media well, but need to focus more on the social part.

The banks getting real traction on social don't post much about products. They post about people, community, and live events. This week, Dan and Chris talk through how to stop posting like a bank, and how to turn social media from a broadcast channel into actual conversations.

• How the social media algorithm works against you (and other banks)

• The litmus test: would a human actually stop scrolling for this?

• How to get real stories flowing from your branches back to the marketing team

• Why compliance doesn't have to kill creativity — and a free FFIEC social media compliance overview you can request

• Giveaways, content buckets, and the 15-minutes-a-day approach to real engagement

• Want the FFIEC social media compliance overview? Reach out: [email protected]

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

At most community banks, marketing puts out ads and tries to pull people in the door. Lending makes calls, shakes hands at Chamber meetings, and occasionally asks marketing for a brochure. Both teams are trying to bring more business into the bank, but only coordinate infrequently.

Community banking is built on relationships, but the relationship between marketing and lending is often not given the attention it deserves. In this episode, Dan and Chris make the case that connecting these two teams gives a bank serious advantage over others still operating in silos.

• Why marketing and lending are running on parallel tracks at most banks — and what both teams are missing because of it

• Three ideas for connecting inbound and outbound marketing and sales efforts

• How marketing can make a lender's cold call a warm one

• What lenders can give marketing that no amount of research will surface on its own

• Want to talk about how your marketing can better support your lending team? Reach out: [email protected]

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

Last episode, we told you to go ask AI about your bank. If you did, you probably didn't love what you found. We gave you some actionable next steps, but we go much further into the "Now what?" this week.

Most of the mass market AEO advice out there is written for e-commerce companies and big local service businesses that live and die on web traffic. Community banks don't operate that way. AI visibility is still important, but there are some things you should do differently when your goal is trust-building and engagement, versus maximum web traffic. Dan and Chris break it down into four concrete steps you can do on your own, starting this week, with no budget and no developer.

In this episode: • Four steps to improve your AI visibility, that you can do now • Why your local competitors and digital competitors are not the same • A technical step that nearly no community banks have done, that you can have AI write for you • How getting started puts you ahead of 90% of community banks Resources: • Google's Rich Results Test for checking your schema: search.google.com/test/rich-results • Want a deeper AI visibility audit? Reach out: [email protected] • The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com • The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com • Contact: [email protected]

Go ask ChatGPT or Claude who the best bank in your town is. Or ask Google AI where to get a small business loan in your county. See what comes back. If your bank isn't in the answer — or worse, if a competitor is — that's not a future problem. That's happening right now, every time a potential customer asks AI for a recommendation instead of typing "bank near me" into Google.

This isn't a traditional search ranking issue. People are having conversations with AI — asking real questions in plain language about real problems. And AI is answering based on what it can find. If your website says "your trusted financial partner" and nothing else, there's nothing for it to work with.

In this episode, Dan and Chris walk through how to audit your bank's AI visibility, why most community banks are invisible in AI results, and what to do about it — starting this week.

• How to audit your AI visibility right now — and why you should search as a customer, not as a banker

• Why generic messaging makes you invisible to AI — and the difference between ranking for a keyword and being the answer to a question

• The thin content problem: why a bullet-point feature list isn't enough anymore

• Why getting specific about your geographies, your customer types, and your specialties makes you more findable — not more narrow

• Who you're competing against online may not be who you think you're competing against on the ground

• Reach out for a deeper AI visibility audit: [email protected]

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

• Contact: [email protected]

Every community bank knows they need to differentiate. But how? Most banks skip the hard part — figuring out what the market actually looks like from the customer's perspective — and jump straight to writing a tagline. The result? Messaging that sounds like every other bank in town.

The answer is whitespace: the gap between what your competitors are saying and what your ideal customers actually need to hear. Find that gap, and you have a marketing message people will pay attention to. Miss it, and you're just adding to the noise.

In this episode, Dan and Chris walk through a four-step process for identifying whitespace in your market and turning it into messaging that resonates with the customers you're trying to reach. The process builds on the AI and competitive analysis topics covered in recent episodes and the Kadince webinar — including a live competitive analysis demo available at bankmarketingshow.com.

In this episode:

• Why most competitive analyses don't lead anywhere useful — and what to do differently

• A four-step process for finding the messaging gap your bank can own

• The difference between digital whitespace and on-the-ground competition — and why both matter

• How AI fits into this process without replacing the thinking

• A simple test to know if your messaging is specific enough

Resources:

• Watch the competitive analysis demo in the AI webinar at bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

• Contact: [email protected]

You can't fake culture. You can put posters in the break room and bring in an ice cream truck on Fridays, but your employees and your customers will know the difference. Real culture is lived, not declared — and when it's real, it shows up in your marketing without you having to force it.

Peter Ort is EVP and COO at MCS Bank in central Pennsylvania, where he oversees operations, development, and marketing strategy. MCS Bank serves communities that range from Penn State's tech-driven economy to rural Amish communities — and Peter's approach to building a consistent culture across that spectrum is something any bank can learn from.

In this episode, we cover: • Why marketing isn't just external — and how celebrating your employees internally creates the stories that power your external brand • The courier who fixed a customer's gate, and why you can't buy that kind of marketing • How to find your real culture: honest assessment, anonymous surveys, and getting out of the corner office • Four elements of a thriving culture: voice, trust, communication, and shared vision • Why Peter hires on attitude over aptitude — and sits in on every interview, including part-time summer hires • The difference between telling your story and telling your customers' stories — and how the best marketing is when your customers celebrate you

Lightning round: • Personal best: Graduated with honors from the Pennsylvania Bankers Association Advanced School of Banking • Book: The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin • Best advice received: Never take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from • What he tells his team: "Are you ready for another day of banking excellence?"

Resources: • Peter Ort: [email protected] • Peter on LinkedIn • Book: The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin • The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com