Your Bank’s Marketing Budget Isn’t the Problem – Your Strategy Is
Marketing today isn’t just about brand awareness — it should be a powerful engine driving customer engagement, digital adoption, and ultimately, revenue. It’s time for banks to stop asking, "How much should we spend on marketing?" and start asking, "How can marketing drive the future of our business?"
By Katie Quilligan, investor at BankTech Ventures and Alana Levine, chief revenue officer at Fintel Connect
Marketing in banking has long been stuck in the past — viewed as a cost center rather than a revenue driver. Too often, marketing is synonymous with billboards, local event sponsorships, and even paper flyers. And while these efforts, in some cases, may help with community presence, they aren’t strategic growth levers. Banks that continue to treat marketing as a supporting function are leaving money on the table. Marketing today isn’t just about brand awareness — it should be a powerful engine driving customer engagement, digital adoption, and ultimately, revenue.
Marketing as a Growth Driver, Not an Expense
Forward-thinking banks understand that marketing is a critical business function that fuels growth, not just a department that manages branding and slogans. The best banks today use marketing to:
- Acquire and retain customers in an increasingly digital-first world
- Increase wallet share by delivering the right products to the right customers at the right time
- Drive digital adoption, improving efficiency and lowering costs
Banks that don’t adapt will find themselves playing catch-up as more agile competitors redefine what effective financial marketing looks like.
Data is the Key to Smarter Marketing
Banks are sitting on a goldmine of data, but many are still guessing when it comes to marketing strategy. Instead of broad, one-size-fits-all campaigns, banks should be using data analytics and predictive modeling to:
- Identify and target high-value customers
- Anticipate customer needs before they arise
- Optimize marketing spend based on real-time performance data
To really prove marketing ROI, marketers need to be able to use data to measure real value that’s been generated for their financial institution. As an example, in the case of net new acquisition campaigns, this means being able to map a specific placement, keyword, or ad to not just a newly opened account or card holder, but to the long-term value of that account over time. Banks should be finding answers to "What balances are in the account six months later? Has the account voluntarily closed? What other products has the account holder adopted?" This transparency allows marketers to refine targeting, optimize spend, and create greater cost per acquisition efficiencies.
With the right approach, marketing teams can track every dollar spent, refine their strategies and prove the impact marketing has on customer acquisition and retention.
Personalized Experiences Win
Modern consumers don’t want generic banking products or offers — they expect personalized, seamless experiences. The best banks are leveraging generative AI and digital engagement tools to create hyper-personalized interactions. Whether it’s predictive recommendations, real-time financial insights, or targeted cross-selling, personalization is key to strengthening relationships and increasing customer lifetime value.
Keeping acquisition strategies customer-centric is just as important as personalizing the ongoing customer experience. Banks need to meet potential customers where they are researching and shopping for financial products. In financial services, this is often happening on third-party sites like Bankrate and NerdWallet. If your institution isn’t present on these platforms, you’re missing a crucial opportunity to be part of the customer’s decision-making process. Looking ahead, banks also need to think about how customers will start discovering financial products through AI-driven tools like ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs). Being optimized for these emerging channels will be a key competitive advantage in the coming years.
Learn more:
- Get Creative: Why Thoughtfully Crafted Content Matters During Core Conversions
- Your Customer-facing AI Systems Will Make Mistakes. How Can You Reduce the Risks?
- Digital-First Banking Made Market Share Irrelevant. What’s Taking its Place?
The Metrics That Matter
Banks can no longer afford to measure marketing success with vague metrics like impressions and clicks. Instead, marketing leaders need to be tracking:
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much does it cost to acquire a new customer, and is that cost sustainable?
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): What is the long-term value of each customer, and how does marketing contribute to increasing that value?
- Digital Conversion Rates: How well is marketing driving customers to take meaningful actions, whether that’s opening accounts, adopting digital tools, or deepening relationships?
In order to track these metrics, marketing teams need to not just work with analytics and web teams, but also engage their bank’s account opening, loan origination and digital banking owners. This will allow marketers to really understand what’s working (or not) and optimize messaging, channels and spend to maximize results.
Without this, marketing will continue to be viewed as an expense rather than a core business function.
Technology Enables Scale
Banks that leverage automation, AI, and performance marketing tools are gaining a significant edge. Digital marketing technology allows banks to scale personalized marketing efforts, optimize ad spend in real time, and reach customers at the moments that matter most.
What does this look like in practice? For sophisticated banks looking to drive core deposits at scale, it requires the ability to efficiently map ad placements and spend to account balances over a one week, one month and even six month period. This results in a greater ability to optimize targeting and allocate spend to channels delivering high-value accounts, and where to double down on budgets to scale up similar results.
Investing in the right technology stack doesn’t just improve marketing efficiency — it drives real business results.
The Banks That Get This Right Will Win
Banking is more competitive than ever, and the institutions that understand the role of marketing as a strategic driver of growth will set the pace for the future. The traditional view of marketing as a cost center is outdated. Today, marketing is the bridge between a bank’s offerings and its customers’ needs. It is the only sales engine that’s truly scalable. It’s time for banks to stop asking, "How much should we spend on marketing?" and start asking, "How can marketing drive the future of our business?"
