While most of the world is in quarantine and practicing social distancing, one social media platform has continued to maintain a rapid growth in downloads, especially in the U.S. According to Sensor Tower’s report, 2019’s second most downloaded app worldwide, TikTok, saw an 18% increase in downloads, tallying the number to 2 million between March 16 and 22, compared to the previous week at 1.7 million.

If you’ve been in the banking business for a while like me, you can attest to the fact that for decades, pundits have declared virtually every recession, economic downturn or national crisis to be the death knell of community banks, and in 2020, the financial emergency caused by the global pandemic is no different.

In this edition of our Plain Talk series, we’ll examine brand trust and corporate social responsibility and discuss how the two are interacting during the current COVID-19 global crisis. We’re exploring the ways smart brands continue to communicate and build trust with consumers from a physical distance.

Community and regional banks facing competition from the bigger money center banks need to know how they can compete effectively and win. If they try to fight the same way as the giants, they will get overpowered and definitely overspent. But if they think like a smaller bank, they’re nimble and responsive enough to compete successfully. So, how do smaller banks prevail? They think like David.

As marketing professionals with years of experience, we’ve all learned to trust, to some degree, that little voice inside our heads that tells us when we may have stumbled across an idea that could be genius. Intuition. Inspiration. The gap in time and space where the magic happens. Creatives in our industry thrive on honing their intuition to drive new ideas and break new creative ground. But in today’s highly fragmented and diverse customer universe, many brands find out the hard way that real insight must guide intuition. In today’s Plain Talk article, we’ll noodle some cautionary instances where a well-written research and insight development plan could have saved brands a lot of money and heartache on controversial ads and promotions.

Ad dollars are on the move in the financial space—increasingly shifting from traditional to digital, specifically to mobile. While financial services have historically relied on more traditional vehicles, times are indeed changing. In this edition of the Compound Interest series, we’ll discuss why it is time to look at digital ads for financial services and how to do it.

If you’re like me, the beginning of the new year means you’ve spent some time thinking through the opportunities and risks that lie ahead in 2020, hopeful that with the right marketing plan, you can enable your institution to grow, keeping customers, employees and the board content. But often, input from stakeholders, overambitious business plans or constraints on staffing and budget mean that not every facet of your plan can be realized. In this first installment of our Compound Interest financial services marketing series, I’ll share some of the valuable things I’ve learned over my 30 years in bank marketing about how to put a successful plan into motion.

Influencer marketing has become a digital monster. Are you doing it? Are you doing it wrong? Should you be doing it at all? If so, how and under what circumstances? In this edition of the Plain Talk series, we’ll take some of the mystery out of influencer marketing and dispel a few myths along the way. First, let’s talk about the money.

In our Plain Talk article earlier this year, Can your website land you in court? Making your website ADA accessible, we discussed a few reasons why businesses should consider upgrading their website accessibility for people with disabilities. At that time, a flood of discrimination lawsuits were hitting the courts that related to Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and we recommended that if your business had a physical location and a website, you should “probably” make it WCAG 2.1 compliant to meet contemporary recommended standards for accessibility. In this edition of our Plain Talk series, we’ll be upgrading that “probably” to a “definitely” and explaining what’s changed and how it may impact you and your business.

If you’ve been advertising online for any amount of time, you’re probably already pretty familiar with a couple of the most common ways to run ads on the web. In this installment of Plain Talk, we’ll break down dynamic search ads vs responsive search ads and what they can do for you.