Treasury Management Marketing Basics

One of the challenges we often see with Community Banks is that they haven’t yet segmented their marketing efforts into retail and business. Typically, they do some marketing for retail (auto loans, personal loans, checking accounts, and mortgages), but completely ignore marketing directly to potential business customers. Let’s review some Treasury Management marketing basics to help in your marketing efforts.

Build a Plan

Just like your business plan, you need a marketing plan. We recommend you build TWO marketing plans – one for retail – and the other for businesses. The reason you would want to build two different plans is that each type of customer (retail and business) speaks different languages. In the famous words of Tom Kenny “Put Yourself in Their Shoes – Write from the perspective of the audience you’re trying to reach. What do they care about? What do they worry about? How do they talk? What gets them excited”?

What to put in your plan? Well, for one you want to keep it simple. Complicating your marketing plan makes it less likely that you’ll be able to accomplish much. We would start with four quadrants of content and then get good at executing them. They are Website, Social Media, Publications and PR and Events.

Website

Your website should always be the centerpiece of your marketing efforts. Some ideas on your content plan for your website could include:

• SEO optimize the site.
• Write a blog and post to the site.
• Gather testimonials and post them to the site.
• Deploy a website chat feature.
• Build video versions of all your static web pages.
• Roll out Google retargeting via AdWords.

Social Media

As a marketer (or the person in charge of marketing at your bank), you should know the social media your business customers frequently use. If you don’t know, ask them. Then, build a social media posting plan based on where your potential business customers are. Some ideas are:

• LinkedIn – many business folks are on LinkedIn, and you should be also!
• YouTube – consider producing content just for YouTube. Maybe start with video versions of static pages on your website, then build from there.
• Other social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X, Rumble, and Google My Business are all places for your content.

Publications and PR

Publications are where your monthly customer newsletter fall. Have you considered making a business focused version of that newsletter? Newsletters have considerable time associated with publishing them, but if you have the staff, you should be doing them.

• Monthly Newsletter – consider producing a business version of your retail newsletter. Also, can you produce a version for customers and a version for prospects?
• PR Opportunities – “Best places to work” listings and other local “paid” awards.

Events

Most Community Banks are great at both holding and attending events. However, have you considered holding and attending business focused events?

• In-Person Events – industry conferences focused on verticals such as agriculture, manufacturing, and commercial real estate.
• Lunch and Learns – host some lunch and learns for local customers and prospects.
• Team up with a Customer – co-host a business focused event with a complimentary business (law firm, CPA firm, insurance firm).

Hopefully you have a few ideas on building a simple marketing plan for your Treasury Management department and these Treasury Management marketing basics inspire action by your marketing team.

Looking for the complete plan? Our TMClarity Framework has this entire content marketing plan fully documented and ready to be adopted into your marketing plans.