Q: how do you promote your bank?

You always get the best advertising from word of mouth.

We get involved in local community affairs. We go to various committee meetings and such.

We have a newsletter that we release quarterly, which goes to all our customers. The newsletter is good because it is a rifle rather than a shotgun approach.

We also advertise locally. If we were to launch a new product, we would get quite an ad campaign going with print, TV, and radio commercials, like we did with the debit card this year.

We don't have much alotted to advertising, but we've had pretty good success with the way we're doing it now.

We have 22 full-time employees, so that means we've got 22 salespersons in our community. We make a lot of calls to our satisfied customers, who also spread things by word of mouth.

We have no billboards and very few newspaper ads. We don't sell our data base, either.

We sometimes put stuffers in the monthly statement to specify one particular product.

If I was to introduce a new product, I would create a test market with my employees, educate them, and teach them to promote it to the community. And they're rewarded for it.

We're a small community bank, so part of our promotions go through mailings to our customer base. We have used internal mailing lists and taken a free ride with mailers, dropping brochures to our customers for our trust and investment group.

We also use newspaper ads as our primary medium. We have used billboards in the past, and to a lesser extent TV and radio,

Although many of our directors sit on local community committees, we have concentrated less on community events and more on trying to sell our products.

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