Bank Marketing Tactics: How To Turn Holidays Into a Pot of Gold

Every bank and credit union communicates with customers/members around holidays, whether through holiday promotions, bank holiday hours, or fun social posts that tie into the spirit of the season.

In this edition of Compound Interest, we will discuss bank marketing tactics that financial institutions can implement to make the most of holiday communications.

• Spring Into Promotional Season With St. Patrick’s Day
• Be Selective About Which Holidays To Go Big On
• Communicate Holiday Hours To Stay Top of Mind
• Have Some Fun With Holiday Messaging
• Get Expert Help With Your Bank Marketing Tactics for the Holidays

Spring Into Promotional Season With St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day may not be the first holiday that comes to mind for most people. But for financial services marketers, it’s a symbolic date because of when it falls on the calendar. After the first two months of the year, March is when bank promotional windows seem to really kick into bloom. Several bank products, such as HELOCs and mortgages, tend to ramp up in spring. Outside of product seasonality, spring fever can help stimulate optimism, travel, and consumer activity. All of these can have a positive downstream effect on banks. St. Patrick’s Day is the first in line. Not too far after it comes Memorial Day, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day. Before we know it, the year is half over.

Focus on St. Patrick’s Day events important to your local community

Having a purposeful plan in place going into spring is helpful for picking your battles. Holidays such as St. Patrick’s Day aren’t going to be the right time to make a splash for every bank or credit union. You can be more efficient and effective by focusing your efforts on holidays or events that tie into your brand or that are especially important to your local community. One example for St. Patrick’s Day is Grow Financial Credit Union sponsoring the Mayor’s River O’ Green Fest in Tampa.

The city of Tampa dyes the Hillsborough River green every St. Patrick’s Day. Sponsoring this event makes sense for Grow Financial for several reasons. Typical of most credit unions, the local community is important to Grow Financial. At the same time, St. Patrick’s Day is important to Tampans. In fact, it ranks as one of the best cities in the U.S. to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. It also doesn’t hurt that Grow Financial’s primary brand color is green. Being able to dye an entire river that runs right through your market your brand color is one thing. But doing so as part of holiday festivities that your local community is passionate about is a win-win.

Be Selective About Which Holidays To Go Big On

Simply focusing more on big holidays versus smaller ones can be a shortsighted approach. When considering bank marketing tactics for the holidays, many criteria come into play when selecting which holidays to emphasize. Below are three of the most important considerations to plan for.

1. Remember that holidays can be an emotional time

For larger holidays especially, emotions can run hot during these times of the year. CX is at the core of everything financial services providers do. It’s key to factor behavioral psychology into our communications. The November/December timeframe is what first comes to mind for most of us when we think about the holidays. Although a wonderful time of year, remember that it’s also an especially anxious time of year for many. While you can’t solve that problem for your customers, it doesn’t mean you can’t be purposeful about easing some of the causes of it.

The financial stress associated with preparing for the holidays can be immense. Offering a cashback offer when customers or prospects are beginning their holiday shopping can be a great way to ease this burden a bit. It also allows you to improve your market share just before a key time of year when consumer spending skyrockets. Here’s an example from one of our clients, Centra Credit Union. They used the holidays as an opportunity to promote their Cashback Checking Account and offered a $50 deposit for new accounts.

Other times of the year also come with psychological levers that you should be thoughtful about. For example, spring is often a time when homeowners are most likely to take on a new home project. The Fourth of July is a time when patriotism is high. Of course, it’s also a prime travel time for families with children.

A deep understanding of your customer base’s psychographic makeup can be a powerful tool in helping predict what your target’s emotional state might be during these key times of the year. This can not only help you in determining what types of promotions will be most fitting during these holidays, but it can also enable you to show empathy and understanding in your messaging. This can be such a powerful differentiator for small and regional financial institutions going up against big national competitors for market share.

2. Tailor to your customer and/or prospect base

Another way to select holidays is by looking at your current customer base as well as your ideal new customer targeting profile. This can not only be a great way to be selective about promotions tied to holidays but can also serve as an opportunity to buck a stereotype in a way that aligns with your target audience. For instance, let’s say you’re currently targeting females that are between the ages of 25 and 45 for checking growth. However, you also know that a high percentage of the mothers in your target geography are working moms. What better time to run a checking promo around Mother’s Day with messaging that doesn’t alienate any moms? This is being thoughtful about not inadvertently portraying any traditional mother stereotypes.

The same logic can be applied to Father’s Day. Run a promotion that allows the modern dad to win an experience they can enjoy with their kids rather than buying them the next round of beer and wings at the local sports bar.

3. Find where you can offer advice or value

This ties back to thinking about where your target audience might be mentally during a certain time of year or holiday. Is it likely that they have something weighing on them at that time? Maybe an annual family vacation, going back to school, applying to jobs after graduation, or paying taxes? If so, consider how you can help. Every time you offer value won’t simply be due to a promotion you’re running. Maybe you can offer timely seasonal advice instead. This is another way to determine which holidays to make a big deal about and which ones to acknowledge with a lighter touch.

Communicate Holiday Hours To Stay Top of Mind

While much of this article is tied to thoughts around promotions and attracting new customers, the holidays also offer a greater opportunity to stay in front of your existing customers. Being top of mind is essential to both growing and protecting share of wallet. It’s critical to communicate closures around federal holidays as well as adjusted hours around holidays or events that you’re not closed for. There are two key items to keep in mind when doing this:

1. The first is to be thoughtful about the mix of channels you’re using to communicate closures/hour modifications. Knowing your customers’ preferences and behaviors can help with this. However, it’s a good general rule of thumb not to exclude any of your customers from knowing this information. Don’t just think about outbound channels. Consider where customers or members might go to seek this information themselves. On top of your website, you can also set holiday hours or event hours in Google Business Profile. Doing this ensures both online search and voice search users are getting the most up-to-date information.
2. Also, consider if any current promotions you have going on are applicable to existing customers. If they are, remembering to plug them when communicating about modified hours can give the promotion a nice boost without harassing customers about the promo. With it being a secondary message, it’s not an annoyance. Since it’s going out through multiple channels, it presents an opportunity to plug the promo and test which channels were most effective at driving promotional messaging to existing customers.

Have Some Fun With Holiday Messaging

Humor is a frequent and polarizing topic for bank marketers. While the industry is frequently cited for being too serious, there are some good reasons that not all financial institutions find that humor is the right path for them. One is the valid concern of it feeling unauthentic or forced due to not previously being part of their brand identity. Another concern is that it can set an expectation to continue with humor while requiring that messaging is refreshed frequently, so it doesn’t get old. That’s not a complete list of the concerns, but we mention those two because they’re ones that are alleviated during the holidays.

Consumers expect companies to have some fun around the holidays. That expectation makes it more likely for humorous messaging around the holidays to humanize the brand than to make it feel unauthentic. Consumers also know that it’s common for brands to step slightly out of character for special occasions, so there’s no real expectation for the brand to then continue to be humorous in subsequent marketing efforts.

Get Expert Help With Your Bank Marketing Tactics for the Holidays

Hopefully, this article inspires you to ramp up your bank marketing tactics for the holidays. If you would like some help deciding on the right approach for your brand, please let us know. You can give us a call at 502-499-4209 or drop us a note here. One of our experts reach out to you.