Be Better Than ‘Good Enough’: Five Pitfalls in Bank and Credit Union Marketing
In an era where marketing budgets are tight and pressure to demonstrate ROI is intensifying, financial institutions face mounting challenges in connecting with customers. At its core, the piece argues that success in 2025's challenging landscape will depend on institutions' ability to forge deeper emotional connections with customers while maintaining a delicate balance between immediate results and long-term brand building.
By Erinn Steffen, Vice President of Operations at Mower
It’s tough out there for bank and credit union marketers. Competition from digital-first upstarts — with their strong connections to young customers — is intense. Making matters worse, marketing budgets are constrained — just 7.7% of revenues in 2024, according to Gartner — and they’re expected to remain tight in the coming year.
There’s also a growing expectations gap: According to a recent survey of 1,200 U.S. marketing professionals by Dimensional Research, 83% of marketing professionals feel pressure to demonstrate business impact — with 60% reporting that the pressure has ramped up in the past year. Only 51% say that their organization views the marketing team as a strategic partner.
With so many internal and external forces in play, it’s hard to craft a plan and message that will break through. And it’s harder still to avoid unforced errors — sins of omission, paths of least resistance, and "perfectly good" options that will come back to haunt you. With that in mind, here are five common pitfalls that could derail your best intentions.
1. Thinking Short-Term
Too often, marketing budgets are driven by short-term metrics, whether that’s weekly or monthly mortgage applications, deposit growth, or household penetration. Focusing on short-term data puts you at risk of losing sight of your brand’s longer-term health. When marketers run brand and demand campaigns in parallel, they have a much better chance of success. Building long-term brand awareness paves the way for demand campaigns to be more successful because target audiences become more receptive to your products. A singular focus on short-term metrics can quickly become a race to the bottom for "hot money" customers with limited lifetime value.
2. Taking Executive Support for Granted
Chief executives love to slash the budget of anything seen as a cost center. That’s especially true of "soft" campaigns, such as branding efforts aimed at boosting trust, highlighting experience differentiation, or building an emotional connection with customers. The best marketers will show, with data, how spending on long-term brand campaigns drives improved returns versus short-term product campaigns. This requires a focus on measurement, and putting data into persuasive formats to maintain support over time.
3. Pitching Down the Middle
There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll be blunt — all small- to mid-sized banks, credit unions, and wealth managers think they’re special and different but typically describe themselves in ways that are white noise to customers. We’re easy to work with! We’re a trusted partner! We care about your financial wellness! Maybe it’s time to reconsider all of that.
Customers and members can be fickle and often operate at a gut level. In Motley Fool’s 2024 Money Survey, more than 90% of respondents cited quality of customer service and security/fraud protection as key bank differentiators. But many also emphasized less-tangible attributes that differentiate their institution on a deeper level — e.g., diversity of bank leadership (68%), sustainability (70%), and brand reputation (86%). What’s clear is that FIs must bond with existing and future customers based on something other than price or the sort of table-stakes trustworthiness that every bank talks about.
The Motley Fool survey tells us that 76% of consumers are willing to switch banks for the right offer. Can you create a connection on behalf of your brand that will bend that curve. A Zillow study reports that half of Americans cry at least once during the mortgage application process. Can you muster a home loan campaign that taps into these emotions?
4. Over-Stocking Your Creative
Too many banks and credit unions use stock photo images that look just like every other bank’s. I’ve seen more than one financial institution use the exact same photo of the same family, changing only its setting or colors to reflect stylebook requirements. That image of a couple sitting in Adirondack chairs staring at a body of water contemplating their golden years… It’s not having the impact you hope it is.
While professional photo shoots can be expensive, they may be worth the investment. The key is to commission images that powerfully differentiate your brand and create assets that you can leverage over time and across a diverse range of campaigns and channels. If your budget is truly tight, new design tools also make it possible to transform stock photos into higher-impact assets, through graphical overlays, for example, that combine branding and visuals to make the resulting images more "ownable." (Check out Frost Bank and Bremer Bank for two great examples of community financial institutions whose digital assets consistently punch above their weight when it comes to branding power.)
5. Sticking to What’s Always Worked
Staying too committed to familiar strategies can blind you to evolving customer needs and emerging opportunities. Instead, regularly — intentionally — challenge your assumptions and test new approaches. The most successful marketers balance proven tactics with experimentation, recognizing that what worked yesterday may not resonate tomorrow.
Now is an especially good moment to try out new social channels, given the level of disruption among the major platforms. With the U.S. Supreme Court nixing a last-minute reprieve, is TikTok really and truly done in the American market? Will more love start to flow back to Instagram? Will there be a new wave of upheaval at Twitter?
You may also want to rethink the objective of your institution’s typical campaign. If you tend to promote one product at a time, whether a high-yield CD or a mortgage, make some room for relationship building for your next cycle. Even more ambitiously: Can you progress from being the customer’s secondary account to their operational account — the banking equivalent of moving from a casual to a committed relationship. Bottom line: Treat change as an opportunity: Being adaptable not only keeps your initiatives fresh but also sharpens your ability to anticipate shifts in the market.
Most 2025 outlooks see a challenging year ahead for financial institutions. As interest rates remain in motion, and consumer attitudes and propensities move along with them, you may have no choice but to seize the moment. More than anything else, banks and credit unions should ensure that when they deploy marketing they’re playing for keeps, driving customers toward more committed relationships buoyed by your unique approach to meeting their financial and emotional needs.
