Residents of Campbellsville, Ky., population 12,000, take their high school football very seriously, and a bank there has drawn on that passion to promote its Web site.
Citizens Bank and Trust, with $105 million of assets, wanted to position the electronic storefront as part of local life - much like the neighborhood drugstore, the beauty parlor, and Friday night football. So it created an advertisement that ran in the local newspaper depicting a fan-filled set of bleachers where bare-chested men display large painted letters spelling out Citizens' Web address, www.cbtky.com.
St. Louis-based Allegiant Bank, in a promotion for its online banking service, also leveraged hometown football fervor but at the professional level. At the TWA Dome in St. Louis, home of the National Football League's Rams, $1.4 billion-asset Allegiant announced the launching of its Internet banking service by distributing 70,000 mouse pads during halftime one Sunday last fall.
"This enabled us to broaden our reach, connecting with 70,000 people in a short period of time, giving them an item that they're going to take home and use," said Kathy Wakefield, who manages the Allegiant account at the Hughes Group, a St. Louis ad agency. "It was an interactive type of approach, which is an opportunity that you don't get very often."
Community banks, which are often slower than large competitors to embrace the Internet, now are joining the game with flair. Marketing strategies for long-established products like checking accounts have become practically formulaic, but strategies for promoting the Web are still evolving. As a result, many banks employ unconventional techniques in their efforts to steer more customers to the Internet.
As the official bank of the Rams, Allegiant is allowed to do a promotion during one home game per year. Nora Macalady, Allegiant's vice president of marketing, said the mouse pad giveaway happened the day after its transactional Web site went live, and the event proved to be "wonderful" for generating sign-ups.
The mouse pad is adorned with an action shot from a Rams football game - which seems a good way to induce Rams fans to use the item and, thus, put a plug for Allegiant next to the computer. The bank's Web address and logo appear in the grassy area at the bottom of the photo - noticeable but not intrusive.
Newspaper and billboard ads rounded out Allegiant's online banking campaign. Ms. Wakefield said the bank, which is known for its ads featuring cats and fish, opted to continue the animal theme by featuring a mouse in ads for the Internet service.
The mouse was shown moving cheese from one mouse hole to another, to illustrate that customers could go online to transfer funds. Another ad showed the mouse trying to balance himself on a ball, to illustrate that customers could balance their accounts online.
Citizens Bank took a community-portal approach with its Web site, and the advertising campaign reflected that.
Users who log on to the bank's Web site can check out the local news, weather, and sports or shop for coupons from area retailers. So the bank is not just targeting its own customers but also noncustomers who might use the site as their entry to the Internet.
The ad agency Steve Diggs & Friends in Nashville created Citizens' campaign, which mainly used newspaper ads and direct mail.
"Our target market was small-town people with a laid-back way of life," said Tiffany Huffaker Berry, a graphic artist at the agency. "These people are familiar with the Web but still have a person-to-person way of communicating. We wanted people to see cbtky.com not just as a Web site but also as a trusted friend."
To achieve that, the campaign integrated the Web address into slice-of-life photography, using common small-town images. "In our creative sessions," Ms. Berry said, "we discussed several different aspects of what makes a small town a small town: You know your neighbors. Mom-and-pop stores still thrive. You can catch up on the local news at the beauty shop, and high school football games are the main event on a Friday night."
The series of ads includes one with two women in curlers, chatting as they sit under hair dryers. One wears a T-shirt that says "cbtky"; the other's T-shirt finishes the Web address with ".com."
The direct mail component of the campaign consisted of four colorful postcards, which were sent to every household in the county. Each card bore a different image from the newspaper ads.
Terri Cassell, Citizens' marketing director, said the campaign went "very well," with the most recent measure indicating that about 14% of Citizens' checking customers are using online banking.
At Roslyn Savings Bank in Roslyn, N.Y., a valuable tool for getting customers comfortable with online banking has been a 28-page booklet that guides users through the Web site step by step, with plenty of pictures showing where to click along the way, said Peter Labenberg, the vice president for marketing. "Being that we have an older deposit base, we have a lot of nouveau users, not only to online banking but to the Internet itself," he said. "We have to hold customers' hands a little."
Mr. Labenberg said that $8.5 billion-asset Roslyn has never run a big advertising campaign that is designed solely to push its Internet channel.
However, its product ads attract Web site traffic, according to Dan Murphy, an executive vice president and retail banking officer at Roslyn. For example, it advertises loan products, saying in the ads that people can apply on the Web.
Mr. Murphy said Roslyn has been taking about 50 loan applications per month online. One in every five applications is approved, adding $2.8 million to $3.5 million of loans monthly, he said.
Only twice has Roslyn run a newspaper ad specifically for its Web site. But the intention, even with those, was more of a product pitch. The ads were to let people know what products they can get online. "We're not selling the Internet," Mr. Murphy said of those ads. "We're still selling products."
This low-key approach is one Ken Greenberg favors when it comes to online banking.
Mr. Greenberg, an executive vice president at Roslyn's ad agency, Austin & Williams in Hauppauge, N.Y., said not everyone who sees an ad for online banking will own a computer or have Internet service. He thinks, in general, it is more practical to devise a campaign around, say, checking, than to cross-sell online banking to checking customers, using statement stuffers and direct mail.
The numbers attest to Roslyn's online success: Of its 90,000 checking customers, more than 14,000, or 16%, are also Internet banking customers, Mr. Murphy said. Roslyn also has 2,500 customers paying bills online, he said.
Both online banking and bill-paying services are free, Mr. Murphy said, because "we view it as an opportunity to deepen relationships."
That thinking is in line with what industry observers recommend. After studying successful marketing strategies for online banking, e-commerce researchers at Credit Suisse First Boston said in a report last year that offering the service either free or at a low cost is an effective tactic for achieving high penetration rates. The researchers also suggested putting more marketing muscle into online bill payment, which, they pointed out, is a service that keeps customers coming back to the bank Web site month after month.
At $202 million-asset Sutton Bank in Attica, Ohio, marketing officer Rhonda Martin said she believes in trying to build awareness of the Web site continuously and pervasively. After a multimedia "bank in your jammies" campaign last fall, the six-branch bank - where about 10% of the deposit base uses online banking - continues to remind customers about the free service by mentioning it in every quarterly newsletter and making sure the Web address appears on all correspondence. "It's on every piece of paper we have," Ms. Martin said.
The number of sign-ups aside, Ms. Martin offered anecdotal evidence that the big advertising push, which included pajama-themed newspaper ads, billboards, direct mail, and statement stuffers, caught people's attention. "We had a couple of customers walk in the branch in their jammies," she said, with some amusement. "They literally took the message to heart, although I think they missed the gist, which is that you can bank from home."
Ms. McGeer, the former editor of Bank Advertising News, is a freelance writer in New York.
