The Stackpile

The ABA New England Marketing conference in Newport, RI this past Friday touched upon many aspects of the online world, but not much of it was new. More importantly, a good deal of the information was not necessarily relevant to the banking industry. Online marketing efforts can be particularly helpful in tracking results and providing ROI measurements, but this important element seemed to be overlooked.

Particularly when banks are facing the major competitive pressures in the marketplace today, building core deposits and hanging onto a steady lending stream is increasingly difficult. However, there are various ways that banks can target their audience and grow their business with their online applications and online marketing strategies.

The main element I found missing from the conference was how to effectively use new media to target and capture appropriate audience groups. Where was the discussion on turning website visitors to customers? Particularly where Search Engine Marketing and other online marketing and media can target geographies and deliver specific audiences, you are able to target these groups with particular products and messaging.

Of course building an online marketing strategy is greatly dependent on the strength of a bank’s website, and whether the site contains appropriate lead generation applications or forms that capture new accounts or inquiries. However, there are metrics and strategies being employed for our bank clients and other similar professional service clients where online and new media can provide an incredible source of lead generation, and more importantly rapidly grow a client base.

Don’t stop at learning new media and online opportunities, apply them in a way that matches your services and products to those customers searching online.

Posted by Christina on October 24th, 2007
Filed under Banking, Search Engine Marketing, Web | No Comments »

I don’t think I’m the last person to have heard of Adblock, but judging by the amount of coverage I’ve been able to read about it today, I must be pretty close. In case you’re one of the few behind me on this one, Adblock is a plug-in available from Firefox that does, well, exactly what you’d expect something called Adblock to do. Which is interesting, but hardly surprising to anyone familiar with technology, advertising, or the kind of personality that is attracted to pushing the envelope in either field. It seems like there wasn’t a lot of lag time between the advent of pop-up ads before we were offered pop-up ad blockers. More recently, I’m remembering that within two months of launching the iPhone, a hacker found a way to bypass the device’s network restrictions. Technology not only challenges itself, but challenges other industries as well. And in the advertising industry, we’re generally up to the challenge.

Inherent in being creative and capturing attention is the ability to find new and unexpected ways to reach people. I have no doubt that as ad-blocking technology becomes more pervasive, our industry’s response will become more sophisticated. In fact, some of the groundwork is already being laid as marketers launch new ways of presenting themselves through user-generated content and social networking. With about 2.5 million Adblock users worldwide to date, we’ve got some time to prepare for this next wrinkle in the growth of online advertising. Until then, we can continue to read about Adblock and browse through all the Google ads for ad blockers that run adjacent to the articles.

Posted by Kelly on September 17th, 2007
Filed under Advertising, Marketing, Miscellaneous, Search Engine Marketing, Web | No Comments »