Marketing for banks and customer-owned mutuals
Deposit and lending targets on one side, compliance sign-off on the other, and a member base that expects to be treated like owners.
Where the money moves.
A marketing plan for an ADI starts at the balance sheet, not the brand deck. Treasury sets the deposit target, credit sets the lending target, and marketing has to move both without damaging the net interest margin. That is a different job to filling a funnel. We build the campaign against the funding gap the CFO is actually carrying, then report cost per funded loan and cost per dollar of retail deposit inflow, so the spend can be defended at the board table in the same language the rest of the paper is written in.
Every asset moves through compliance before it runs, and the version that comes back is rarely the version that went in. We write to the constraint from the first draft: comparison rate beside the advertised rate, the target market determination sitting behind the product, credit criteria disclosed, every claim traceable to a source. Legal and risk receive a pack with the reasoning attached rather than a file to interpret. Fewer rounds follow, and campaigns go live inside the rate window they were built for.
Customer-owned banks carry an obligation shareholders never impose. Members read the annual report, turn up to the AGM, and judge the community grants programme as closely as the term deposit rate. Content that treats them as a database performs exactly as well as it deserves to. We build the member story out of real branches, real staff and real local funding, then run it in the catchments where the branch network still earns its keep, so the local sponsorship and the digital spend pull in one direction instead of being budgeted separately.
Rate movements do not wait for a production schedule. When the pricing committee responds to a board decision, the home loan page, the term deposit table, the search ads and the comparison listings all have to change at once. Holding the site, the ad accounts and the creative under one team is what makes that possible. Everything sits in the bank's name from day one, so the account history, the audience data and the domain authority accumulate on your side of the ledger.
What we run.
Rate-reactive pages and search
Home loan and term deposit pages built to be repriced without a developer, with the comparison rate, the disclosure block and the schema templated. Search ads move on the same trigger, so the offer live on the page matches the one being bid on.
Compliance-ready asset packs
Each campaign ships as one pack: copy, disclosure, target market reasoning and source citations. Compliance reviews an argument instead of assembling one, and approved language is stored for reuse across the next product refresh.
Branch catchment media
Paid social and search fenced to the postcodes each branch genuinely services, matched to the sponsorships and grants already committed. Community investment stops being a cost line and starts feeding the acquisition number.
Member lifecycle email
Onboarding, cross-hold and pre-maturity sequences triggered off the core banking data you already hold. A term deposit rolling off is a marketing event and gets treated like one, rather than a letter nobody wrote.
Comparison and awards presence
Rate table listings, awards submissions and review profiles maintained as a channel with an owner, because a rate shopper reads a comparison placement long before they read a brand campaign.
Questions we get asked.
It is written to survive it. Disclosure sits in the first draft rather than the final round: comparison rate beside the advertised rate, target market reasoning attached, credit criteria stated, every claim traceable to a source your risk team can check. Compliance receives a pack with the argument already made, which is what shortens a review cycle.
That is how we prefer to report. Applications, funded loans and retail deposit inflow are joined back to the campaigns that produced them, so spend is stated as cost per funded loan and cost per dollar of deposit rather than cost per click. It gives you a marketing line in the board pack written in the same terms as the rest of it.
The bank does, from the first day. Google and Meta accounts, analytics, the domain, the creative files and the audience data are created under your entity and your billing. Nothing sits behind a third party licence. If the working relationship ends, the account history and the accumulated learning stay where they were built, which is the part that takes years to replace.
Yes, and separating the two is usually the mistake. Grants, local sponsorship and branch presence already cost money, so the content and the media plan are built to make that investment visible to the same people the acquisition campaign is reaching. Members read the annual report and the AGM material with real attention, so those are treated as brand assets too.
Also in financial services
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