Client Success: Increasing Foot Traffic and Business Accounts for a Multi-Location Bank

With higher average balances and more financial activity from account-holders, business accounts typically offer more value to financial institutions than personal checking and savings accounts. For brick-and-mortar banks, local business accounts play a critical role in driving revenue and value from those physical locations.

After noticing a quarterly decline in its business accounts, one local multi-location bank decided it needed to make a better effort at connecting with local businesses and growing its number of local business accounts. The financial institution reached out to Cox Media for help creating a digital campaign that could address these needs.

The Goal

Attracting new business accounts was a top objective for the bank—but it wasn’t the only one. In fact, the company’s recent decline in business accounts seemed to be symptomatic of the brand’s broader struggle to leverage its physical presence in its community.

Along with attracting new business clients, the multi-location bank also wanted to increase foot traffic to its locations, as well as virtual traffic to its website. The company also needed a campaign strategy that could track these referrals to better understand how foot traffic and website visits translate to ROI.

The Solution

A waterfall digital strategy lent itself perfectly to the company’s goals of building local awareness and improving the client’s ability to track referrals and attribute ROI to these marketing efforts. Cox Media’s experts developed a multi-channel campaign using display and video ads targeted to local businesses through addressable geofencing.

This custom curated audience focused on for-profit, commercial business owners between the ages of 25 and 55. Digital targeting filters were used to identify owners of businesses that were likely to have strong financial health, making them valuable account-holders at the bank.

With such precise targeting of a niche audience, the campaign allowed the bank to focus all of its marketing budget and resources on a select audience of high-value prospects. This narrow focus also made it easier to not only track conversion and other engagements, but to monitor campaign performance to identify trends faster than if the campaign had been targeted to a broad audience.

The Results

After an initial 90-day trial campaign, our banking client reported the following results:

• A total of 754 geotargeted conversions;
• A broader increase in business account sign-ups outside of these geotargeted conversions;
• Increased foot traffic to bank branches, as well as increased traffic to the company website;
• Improved audience tracking to improve analytics and enable more effective retargeting campaigns.

Based on the strong performance of this initial 90-day run, the multi-location bank opted to extend this trial campaign into a full 12-month campaign. In addition, Cox Media’s strategy team is working with the bank to develop new campaigns and strategic elements, including website retargeting and new ad creative. Over time, the bank hopes to expand these digital campaigns to serve additional bank branches.

When your business is investing in building a digital strategy, it pays to have a partner that can track campaign results, optimize based on performance, and push your ROI higher to generate greater value over time.

Whether you’re a bank or another local business trying to connect with a local audience, Cox Media offers the perfect mix of in-house expertise and innovative tools to help your business reach these goals. Contact us today to find out how we can help.