Peek Inside: Fidelity Bank’s In-House Marketing Department

Systems & Tools

In-House vs. Vendor

Social Media Strategy

We started exploring the use of social media in early 2010 and began with a Facebook and Twitter account. Later in the year, we began posting our television commercials to YouTube.

Our social media strategy is based on "conversing" with our customers. It is an extension of our public relations policy: to make friends and build Fidelity Bank’s persona as a bank to do business with. We plan out weekly "discussion" points as a start and try to keep and maintain a conversation. It is also used to invite people to events we are holding, publicize product specials, etc.

Our Marketing Communications Officer spends about eight hours a week on social media. We check it first thing in the morning and then again later in the afternoon. With a small staff it is impossible to have one person dedicated to this.

My advice to other institutions is to use it as a means to continue conversations with your customers and potential customers. Give something of value. Very early on we were watching a big bank to pick up hints and they were tweeting about rush hour. I don’t think that furthers your brand and its just someone wasting time. Talk about how your bank interacts with your customers’ life, but do it in a conversational and knowledge-sharing way.

URL for Twitter account: @fidelity_bank
Nature of tweets: Press releases and announcements
Twitter account created: February 5, 2009
Twitter followers: 1,426 (equal to 4.1% of overall customer base)
Accounts followed: 241
Tweets sent: 242
Average # of tweets sent per day: 0.21
Average # of followers added per day: 1.26

URL for Facebook page: facebook.com/bankatfidelity
Number of Facebook Likes: 1,954 (equal to 5.6% of overall customer base)

URL for YouTube channel: youtube.com/bankatfidelity
YouTube account created: April 29, 2010
Number of videos uploaded: 6
Number of subscribers: 6
Total video views: 1,467
Average # of views per video: 245

Marketing Channels Deployed

Marketing Strategy

How do you track marketing ROI?
We are very big on measuring initiatives, and measure every piece of direct mail that leaves the building. On other things its far harder to determine, so we watch for incremental growth, net new households, profitability per household, checking customers with direct deposit or active checking, share of wallet, and the elimination of single service households. We use a number of tools to generate reports. Our core system has a report writing feature that we use to manage sales reporting on a daily and weekly basis. We also use an MCIF to determine the other data points. Our ROI is measured by growth in loans and deposits in a certain time frame. We use all costs in our measurement except for the overhead cost of staff.

Biggest challenge in the next 12 months?
Staying out of the weeds so that we can be very strategic in our approach while capitalizing on the opportunities the bank needs to grow.

Critical products/services to market this year?
Small business development. We will use an integrated marketing and sales plan that will incorporate all components of a marketing communications initiative — media, direct mail, social, web, point of sale — while incorporating a very structured and deliberate sales process.

Favorite campaign?
We’ve had some very successful campaigns, however, my favorite is when we launched our Green Team – a children’s savings initiative that featured a "club" for children, a "name the mascot" contest that resulted in our "Sammy Saves-a-lot", special quarterly events for Green Team members. It surpassed our projected ROI within 9 months and continues to be a big draw to our prime retail target market.