Client Success: Increasing Financial Services Accounts for a San Diego Bank

The success of any local bank is tied to its ability to attract as many local account-holders as possible. But opening new checking and savings accounts is only part of building a sustainable banking business. Those institutions want to serve as the go-to financial destination for a wide range of services, including lending products and financial services such as investing and long-term retirement planning.

When one local bank in the San Diego area decided to focus its advertising efforts on increasing client counts for its financial services division, the company decided it would work with multiple digital advertising agencies to deploy the same campaign and compare results based on the targeting strategy used by each of those partners.

The bank reached out to Cox Media to see how its approach to advertising stacked up against the competition.

The Goal

By the time the banking client reached out to Cox Media, it had already made the decision to invest its digital budget into a TV Everywhere campaign. While the business was eager to maximize impressions and video completion rate through TVE’s targeted ad delivery capabilities, the company was also interested in gauging how effectively those targeted ads could deliver new applications for its financial services.

The client also approached Cox Media with a strong sense of the buyer personas it was looking to target through TVE’s ad platform. With these data points in-hand, the ultimate goal was to launch a more cost-effective top-of-funnel ad campaign that achieved greater engagement with a target audience—and ideally led to bottom-funnel actions such as contacting the bank and completing an application.

The Solution

With the client’s goals and target audience well-established, Cox Media recommended a TVE strategy that leveraged several layers of audience targeting to reach the most relevant audience possible.

This strategy included geotargeting ads to the San Diego Designated Market Area (DMA), which focused ad impressions to local audiences in close proximity to the bank’s brick-and-mortar locations. Cox Media also implemented hyper-focused behavioral targeting parameters to isolate ad impressions to audiences that displayed specific criteria that aligned with the client’s target buyer personas.

The ads then utilized Cox’s Audience Extension TVE capabilities to place the ads on specific networks to extend the campaign’s reach across all properties where the bank’s target audience could be found.

The Results

Over a six-month period, Cox Media’s TVE campaign delivered the following results for the client:

• More than 2.3 million total impressions;
• An 82 percent video completion rate;
• An average of 7 to 14 applications per month referred from the TVE campaign.

After this six month trial, the bank praised Cox Media’s ad strategy and TVE advertising platform for delivering more conversions than the company had received through any other ad campaign—including other campaigns that leveraged TVE and over-the-top (OTT) ad placements.

“Typically, we only expect to see impressions and completion rate, and frankly were surprised by how strong the results were,” said a sales representative working with the bank. “That speaks to the audience targeting capabilities and the quality of that [TV Everywhere] audience.”

Find out how TVE and other digital targeting capabilities can improve your ad performance and generate better ROI than your ad campaigns of the past. Contact Cox Media today to learn more.