Propagate Fintech Podcast
Propagate Fintech is a podcast exploring how financial services actually evolve.
Hosted by Roland Howard, the show features in-depth conversations with fintech founders, bank and credit union leaders, operators, and industry voices shaping lending, deposits, payments, account origination, and go-to-market strategy.
Each episode cuts through hype to focus on real-world execution: how products get adopted, why institutions struggle to modernize, where growth stalls, and what works when fintechs and regulated financial institutions intersect.
The podcast is produced by Propagate Fintech, an end-to-end marketing and PR agency serving the banking and fintech industry. Propagate partners with fintechs, banks, and credit unions to clarify positioning, build credibility, and drive growth through brand strategy, content, PR, and go-to-market execution.
Propagate Fintech Podcast
Inside a Community Bank's Marketing Ops, with Jeffrey Wright
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Most banks think they've solved personalization because a customer's first name shows up in an email. Jeffrey Wright, Digital Communications and Strategy Manager at a community bank, makes the case for something deeper: knowing a CD is about to mature, knowing the renewal rate before the customer asks, and reaching out before it becomes a problem.
We get into what Jeff calls the Frankenstein data problem, the same customer showing up as three different records across insurance, mortgage, and the core. We talk about why attribution is one of the hardest things in bank marketing, from billboards to abandoned forms sitting in the wrong system. And we cover the operator's side of the job: choosing channels, earning executive buy-in, and running an AI agent inside Monday.com that's slowly becoming the bank's entire campaign operating system.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Real personalization vs a first name in an email
02:04 - Inside the CD renewal campaign: 14-day, 7-day, and 4-day triggers
04:51 - What happens to the money when a CD matures
06:16 - Turning one product's end into the next conversation
07:30 - Why banks lag behind credit card aggregators on remarketing
09:38 - Not all data needs to sync in real time
11:23 - The Frankenstein data problem
13:06 - Centralizing on Salesforce and Data 360
16:56 - Trusting the data over the gut
18:59 - How to evaluate a new channel before jumping in
22:32 - What's hardest to attribute in bank marketing
24:41 - Finding a distinct voice without going off brand
30:37 - Humor as an underused tool in bank marketing
31:38 - Getting executive buy-in for something untested
35:16 - Running an AI agent inside Monday.com
39:26 - Technical debt and the fragmented campaign problem
OTHER EPISODES
Why Most Digital Transformation in Banking Fails, with ICBA's Justin Dunmyer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt-BRZK1BdA
What Happens When Credit Scores Meet Cashflow, with American Banker's Melinda Huspen https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-propagate-fintech-podcast-321066386/episode/what-happens-when-credit-scores-meet-321910552/
YOUTUBE SHORTS
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Z2Wq8uA5eVg https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tk4nzXXrJqs https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rdY1Q1vzPFI
LISTEN ANYWHERE
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/propagate-fintech-podcast/id1874648654
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6uQG5hQufhHLVDilxuXUuq YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-WE52Kq2dzXCTaL6SWbYRQ
Book 30 minutes with Roland: https://calendly.com/roland-propagatefintech/30min
Want to work with Propagate Fintech? Fill out a contact form at www.propagatefintech.com
What's going on, y'all? Today's episode is about marketing at a community bank. Specifically, what it actually takes to run marketing well when your data is scattered across online banking, your core Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever it may be, your budget is tight, and everybody upstream thinks your job is making flyers and managing PPC budgets. So we're going to cover personalization that goes beyond just a first name and an email, right? There's so much more to personalization than that, and there's so much more that customers are expecting in that space. We're going to talk about the Frankenstein data problem. For example, when you have customers showing up in three different ways across your ecosystem, attribution, why so much of that is really hard as a marketer. And we are going to really unpack Jeffrey Wright's playbook as a marketing leader in the community institution in the southeast. He is in the middle of solving it all. Salesforce, data 360, alchemy, online banking, running AI agents inside Monday.com. This is going to be a great tactical episode for anybody in the trenches trying to learn what others are doing in the industry. Also worth mentioning, we did have a little technical snafu, a very stubborn Microsoft update that had to be done right then and there. So if you can hear a little choppiness in the editing at the tail end, that is why. So my apologies. Hope you enjoy it. This is a good one. Check it out. So, Jeff, I want to draw you out on personalization. This is something that you've talked quite a bit about and something that you are working with in your day-to-day. A lot of banks think that they've solved for personalization because they have a customer's first name in email, but you talk about there being a lot more to this. For example, if somebody's CD is coming up for maturity, you know, using that as a guide to that customer's next step. You know, what would you say separates real personalization from kind of that surface level version that banks are still operating with?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that we need to do away with uh the standard personalization of names. I think it's important to have that connection. I mean, it's the same when you walk into uh your hotel room and you see your name up on the TV screen. You kind of get that little jolt of like, ooh, that's exciting. You know, they know that I'm actually here. Sure. But when I when you start talking about finances, you also want to know that someone is more aware of what's going on behind the screen for you. So what's happening in my bank account, what's happening with my CDs, what's happening in my, you know, money market account, and able to talk to me on that level. Now, obviously I'm in a community bank situation and credit unions are kind of in a similar situation in terms of you you have that customer relationship that's also on a personal level, right, with either an individual banker or someone that you've you've worked with. But in my world, in the digital world, I'm trying to emulate, duplicate, or or fill in that gap in a very similar fashion because we're trying to do this on scale, right? We have X amount of customers that we have to reach in a short period of time, and we need to be as real as possible with our personalization and accurate, which is probably the that's the other piece, right? You're only going to be able to personalize as well as the accuracy of your data, the confidence that you have in it.
SPEAKER_00Fair enough. So you guys have so many tools at your disposal as any you know contemporary marketer within a institution does today. What are the tools that you're using today that allow you to really nail that personalization and skate to where the proverbial puck is going on the customer's needs?
SPEAKER_01So we have a couple in place. One that I use actively is Alchemy, uh, their segment tool, which is data and marketing analytics. And that's the one that I'm using currently for the CD piece. So, like if I were to step you through that, is I first create this um campaign within segment that says, take a look at my CD customers, take a look at their maturity date, let me know when they're 14 uh days out. So that's a trigger that happens, right? So the CD is to mature in 14 days. We want to email the customer. And why are we wanting to email the customer? Well, because that's easier for us is to send an email out than to put bodies on calls that early in the process. Uh, we're trying to look for creating inbound calls if possible. So we want to elevate this to the customer's attention and have them take action on it some sort. We want to remind them again within a few days after that. And then we want that that reminder to happen before the next trigger, which is the seven-day mark, because the seven-day mark, our communications are going to be a little bit more urgent with more specific options. And then maybe that four-day email, we remind them, hey, here's what happens if you do nothing. Because in a lot of cases it's an auto-renewal, but maybe it's not at the most advantageous rate, right? And it's much easier to solve a problem before it becomes a problem, at least in my my experience. So, what's the ideal for this though? So, like if I could say we've got all of this in place, what would make it even better? Immediate feedback. So when the status changes on the CD, so when we remove from the campaign, and I do have some ways of doing that within alchemy, but I would love to have that super real time. Uh track what the status change is so that we can determine the types of successes. Because maybe there's more than one actual success in this versus just, hey, it's no longer in a renewal state. Notification of the CSR on day three. Why day three? Because we've sent a day four email. We've got three days in there. Now maybe it's time to have that more personal touch is we're going to reach out via phone. Maybe they've seen the emails, they've thought that they were going to take action and it never happened. We still have a chance to do it. We still reduce the number of F-bound calls. And then obviously the personalization piece I'd liked in there, I want to know what the specific maturity date is. Even better if I knew what the current rate is and what the renewal rate is going to be, because then they've got something to compare to. And they're like, oh, hey, I want to see what other options I've got out there besides just an automatic renewal. And lastly.
SPEAKER_00Do you guys have a way to uh say, hey, this is coming up for maturity? This might be a nice option to park the investment at.
SPEAKER_01Yes. One of the things that we take a look at is everything that they could do. What do they do with the money when it when it does mature? Hey, do you want to talk to Wealth Advisory? Do you want to roll it in with other funds and do a larger CD? Do you want to move it temporarily into savings because you've got an expenditure coming up and that's what you've you've been this has been a long-term savings vehicle for you. Maybe it's a down payment for a car. So we do offer all these different options. Now, my last ideal for this is the ability to renew that CD online. Because if we can do that, then we don't even have the inbound call taking place for some people. They're just like, let me take care of this. Or what if the next offer is, hey, do you want to renew the CD online or do you want to schedule a conversation with the banker to talk about your options? And that one is the one that I would love to do early on in the process, right around that 14-day mark. That way we've got time for them to have the conversation. And then in my world, it's they've acted on this, they want to talk to someone. How do I get that lead to my banker in a super timely fashion so they can reach out immediately, have the conversation, and kind of deepen that relationship because that's what we're trying to do, right? We're trying to strengthen the relationship with our customers. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_00And I like how you guys are inserting yourself into the sequence of needs for these customers where the sun is setting on the value of one product and it's time for the next one to begin, whatever that may be, maybe it's a renewal of the, you know, of the CD. But I love that you guys have the tools in place to identify that and to make those put those things in motion for a customer.
SPEAKER_01Right. If we know why they're opening the CD in the first place. So let's go back to our example of, hey, we're wanting to put a deposit down on uh on a car. Well, that means they also potentially need a car loan, right? So why wouldn't we be talking to them in the meantime while that CD is working for them to say, hey, let's start lining some of this up and take a look at options where we might be able to help you with your purchase. And then that creates another conversation with another line of business. But all more importantly, maybe that would be something that we could work into the system and send them some nice nurturing emails along the way. Hey, don't forget this money is starting to work for you, and we've got, you know, opportunities for you once it matures. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_00You're like the matchmaker at the bank for all the other business units. That would be ideal, yes. So uh one last question for you on the personalization note. So we talked a little bit about credit card aggregator sites and how they can re-market to somebody within minutes of an abandoned application because they have already captured this data, you know, telling them that this individual didn't finish the application. You know, community banks and credit unions in many respects have access to the same data and more. You know, why do you think that we're still working with such a delay in the industry?
SPEAKER_01Honestly, I've only been in the banking industry for about four years now. I've been in mortgage prior to that, but everything that I'm seeing when I talk to other folks in similar situations is marketing historically hasn't been centralized, at least at the community bank level. It's been at the branch with the banking managers and the team members and the lines of business owners, where they have worked on building these connections, but they've also managed kind of local marketing and what has worked for them. But what we're trying to do is on a larger scale, and so it's hard to get these different pieces back together, not only from a budgetary standpoint, but from where's the data coming from. So the people in the systems that need to reach out for that remarketing, typically we don't have visibility because that is sitting somewhere else. So if it's an abandoned form that hasn't been completed, whether it's an application, whether it's even a quote request or anything along those lines, it may be sitting in a system that was kind of tacked on as we've started building and evolving from a technology standpoint and a marketing standpoint. And we've tried to centralize things, but we still have to deal with the data that's sitting out there. So that form may be sitting in an application tool waiting for a sync. And maybe that sync happens on that daily basis, but it's behind other things that have been determined to either need to be a higher priority in a sync, or they just were first in line. And we're waiting for all that data to process before we can even get our hands on it. But it does open up a uh conversation is I think that not all data needs to sync real time.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So Whoa, controversial take.
SPEAKER_01Please, please uh say more. Well, from a met from a marketing standpoint, I will tell you that there are certain things for us to get our message out that it doesn't matter whether it happened two minutes ago, two hours ago, two days ago, because the message isn't mission critical. But I will tell you what you do need is you do need to have a plan thought out ahead of time for what does need to sync real time. So it's a and it's okay to table the sync even or even a data point as long as everyone understands the why and it's documented, so that you're not having the same conversation over and over because no one has tracked the why. So let's think, let's go back to our CD. Um we want that to be real time, right? We want to know when that has happened because then we can determine, hey, what's that next conversation look like? Or hey, it hasn't happened yet. So we really need to reach out to them on that day three because we don't want that all the renewal to necessarily take place. But if someone has opened an account and we've already given them the real-time transactions like, hey, they've requested a debit card. So a debit card, we want that to be a real-time data point because we want to give them instructions if for whatever reasons they don't activate it right then and there, right? But I don't need to let them know necessarily that e-statements are available to them within three minutes of their having opened an account. Uh so we could wait two or three days even to see maybe they signed up for e-statements on their own. So they don't need that email. But if they haven't, then yeah, we can wait for a normal sync for that. And if we're waiting for a sync for certain data points, maybe that makes room for syncs on other ones from other systems. So that's just that's what I mean by not everything has to be real time. Because your cost could also go up. Think about it. I mean, a lot of systems are using these uh credits that you have to spend in order to get that data real time or for these processes to happen. Right. And so you could blow all of your budget trying to do all data all now. And that's not very judicious when you really do have probably a finite, I know marketing does. We have a finite budget for for what we can use and what we can spin in terms of those.
SPEAKER_00Let me draw you out a little bit on you know the Frankenstein data situation here. So, you know, you've got the same person potentially showing up in different ways across insurance, wealth, mortgage, the core, you know, duplicate records. How does that impact marketing? And how how are you guys solving for that?
SPEAKER_01I mean, realistically, partial pictures means partial communications. And the core alerted to that is duplicate records translates to duplicate messaging risks. So I I think one of the things that we have to take a look at is when we don't have a complete picture is what does our messaging look like? What does our communication look like? And I hate to use the term vague speak, but that's what it ends up being. You know, so before I knew what the CD maturity date was, it was, hey, your CD is going to mature in about two weeks, right? So it's a slight difference than your CD is going to mature on September 23rd. And that lack of specificity we can sometimes get away with, but is it the best? Not necessarily.
SPEAKER_00So one of the things that we're trying to look at right now is how are we going to harmonize that data to get the what are the what are the systems that are in scope for harmonization? You have a core, obviously.
SPEAKER_01So we have a Salesforce core and Salesforce. Yeah. And we're bringing in Data 360. That's our next initiative. That and Salesforce personalization. Those can kind of be layered in at about the same time.
SPEAKER_00So you have a Salesforce CRM for marketing related records and probably many other things, but then you also have like your FIS or your FISERF core or your Jack Henry core, whatever that may be. Right. So I'm just so curious, how do you balance keeping the two, you know, like the single source of truth kind of maxim, right? How do you handle that?
SPEAKER_01So we're bringing everything into the Salesforce CRM in terms of having that be our source of truth. And so that's why we're we're really pushing for the Data 360 implementation. We also have Marketing Cloud. So that's kind of where I spend a lot of my time on the marketing side, but it's direct connection, you know, marketing cloud connect right into Salesforce. When the Data 360 comes in, that's when we're going to be bringing in our other lines of business. So that's our insurance, that's our uh mortgage. That's going to be some of our treasury.
SPEAKER_00And for those who are using, let's say, HubSpot and they've kind of used it their whole career, let's say, can you give us a short and sweet on what Data 360 is?
SPEAKER_01So Data 360 basically takes all the different systems that are out there. It pulls the information, it doesn't uphold the information, but it looks at it and it basically takes a look at, hey, Jeff Wright seems to be sitting over here in insurance. Looks like he's sitting over here in in mortgage, and it looks like he may have a savings account with us. But maybe the data is a little skewed because maybe I'm Jeff Wright in in another Jeffrey in in one because of a nickname or however it was put in. So obviously there's some fuzzy logic that it works with, but really it takes a look at what are the the common traits that are sitting out there that leads us to believe that this is actually all one person. So rather than Frankenstein in it, it says, hey, let me give you a single picture of everything that looks like it's out there in this ecosystem. So over for me, over on the marketing cloud side, I can take a look at that and I can say, okay, so Jeff's got these three items in here. What does our conversation look like for him? We don't necessarily need to talk to him specifically about getting insurance, but maybe we can talk to him a little bit about the insurance products he has. But more importantly, it looks like, you know, we should be talking to him about he has a savings account with us, but he doesn't have a checking account, or maybe he has a car loan with us. Well, he could be making that payment directly from uh, you know, a colony checking account. So let's talk to him a little bit about that. So that's one of the things that the Data 360 is going to do for us. It's also going to help me clean up some of those duplicate records that are sitting out there because I can start going through this process and saying, oh yeah, you you you see me three times sitting over here, you know, in marketing cloud because we've had different imports or different ways that we've had to bring that data in in the past. For us, it all comes down to once we have this better picture of them, when I talked about this, what's the next best conversation? You know, that's part of the the Salesforce personalization as well, is that we're putting that into our website when they're coming from our emails or they're clicking into our site and we can recognize them as a customer colony, but we can start seeing, you know, what is their intent, what is it that they're looking for, so that we can actually have real conversations with them rather than just sending out what we hope is going to be meaningful messaging based upon what we, you know, what our gut is telling us. And I'm trying to get away from trusting my gut as much as I uh want to trust the data. And right now, that data, as we talked about the Frankenstein model being all over the place and these different pieces, it's not as trustworthy as I would like it. So that's what the harmonization piece is going to do for us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and turning off the voice from your instincts. I don't know, as a as a creative marketer, I don't love that, but I get what you're saying because you need to be empirical, you need to be objective. When you're a leader at a bank, you are managing the sausage making of marketing, which is the budgets, ad spend, dashboards, KPIs, showing that to leadership and saying, hey, look, that thing I said we should try and do and chase down, it was worth it because of the information in this table here, whatever it it may be. So that's got to be a real balancing act for you as well.
SPEAKER_01It's tough because you know, though we have these marketing principles that have been drilled into us, like, right? Like it's uh, oh, it's three emails. It's kind of like the old essays have to be an intro, three paragraphs that support it, and then a closing one. But you take a look at what college students are are putting now out as essays and what they're being asked to do, and it doesn't follow that trend anymore. So maybe the three email thing isn't the way to go. Maybe the data shows us it is. Hey, it's that third one that they really lock in on. Uh but maybe it's, hey, it's two emails and an SMA, and that's what the that's what it is. And it kind of comes down to, and we'll probably get into this a little bit later, is understanding who your customer is and how you need to be speaking to them. So I I go off of my gut and I use my my I guess my background in terms of what's traditionally happened as the starting point. But then at some point, I have to acknowledge whether my gut was right or wrong based upon the data that's coming back to me.
SPEAKER_00Fair enough. Let's talk about channels. So, you know, we can't be everywhere at once, we can't be everything to everyone. How are you evaluating which channels are worth your attention? TikTok, Instagram, billboards, online banking, w where are you guys showing up right now? And and where are some areas where you're not showing up that other people may be going, you know, huh? That's interesting. I'm surprised you didn't invest in that channel.
SPEAKER_01So I think it comes down to asking ourselves whether we can earn the right to stay in the channel. And part of that is the audience. Are the people there that we need to reach actually in that channel? Just because a competitor is on TikTok doesn't mean we should be jumping on TikTok if we realize that our customers aren't there. We're spending time, resources, and money to get there. Now, that said, maybe some of our specific lines of business or specific folks, maybe in the mortgage industry, are having great success within TikTok on a personal level. That doesn't necessarily mean that we have to scale it at an organizational level, because maybe that niche type of advertising that's happening in TikTok there is perfect for them. It's kind of like digital ads, right? When we're trying to decide where we're gonna spend our money and what markets and what words that we're gonna key off of for that, is we have to make some decisions where is it profitable? The job itself is one of the things we have to take a look at. Does the channel have a specific role? And does it perform it differently or better than some of our other channels? If all we're doing is adding another channel, but we're duplicating the same content and reaching the same audience, then why are we, you know, spending time and resources to kind of spin that out?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's more to it than tweaking the aspect ratio.
SPEAKER_01It really is. It really is, because the the language has to be different. But are we gaining enough ground in order to warrant spending the time doing that? And then the content. You know, what does the content look like six months from now versus launch? Everyone's really excited about the launch of a channel.
SPEAKER_00You know?
SPEAKER_01Launch is always exciting, no matter what.
SPEAKER_00You're launching a new guitar hobby, you're launching a new branch. It's always fun to start something.
SPEAKER_01It is. Let's bring this back to your world. How many podcasts have you seen that start out super strong and then suddenly you see six, 12 months down the road, they're like they've stopped putting out content because they weren't thinking, what does that look like beyond, you know, beyond that initial peak? Yeah, and folks, it's much harder than it looks, let me tell you. I I can believe that. Um and then what's important enough to repeat? Because at some point you are repeating the same message. It's just you may be seeing it differently, but the point that you're trying to get across is hey, we want you to open a checking account. We want you to, you know, we want you to take whatever this action is. So how do we speak about it in such a way that it's meaningful that people also will stay tuned into that channel? Uh, and they're not either unsubscribing from emails, they've decided not to follow you anymore, or you're no longer showing up in their algorithm, whatever, whatever that looks like. Capacity is another one. Can we operate it? So it's it's not just do we have the channel, it's creation, the approvals, compliance, management, reporting, and the ongoing costs. So it's not like all these channels are are free. There's still some accompanying cost, even in the world of email, because we have to have the platform that we're doing it on, right? We have to have the number of contacts that we're gonna that we're we're bringing in, or the number of profiles if you're looking in the world of Data 360. And then measurement. Can we tell whether it's effective? I would say most marketing teams don't need more ways to not demonstrate what the real ROI is. We have plenty of that already. And we have plenty of KPIs that we're trying to be in the hunt for. So I would argue that going into um a new channel, but not having a way to have some sort of measurement is risky because it'll probably be one of the first ones that gets cut when people start taking a look at how do we adjust these budgets down.
SPEAKER_00Well, let me draw you out on that. Well, as a marketer, what are some of the hardest things to tie attribution to?
SPEAKER_01For me, it's I don't do a lot of the physical piece, but if I were to take a look at this, billboards, we do billboards, but we have to set expectations for that, which is it is recognition, whether it's name recognition, brand recognition, or faces. I mean, if you think about in the world of realtors or and lawyers, right? That's whose faces you're seeing on here. Uh, because they're trying to personalize, they're trying to get you to get to know them. Do they think realistically that you're driving slow enough to grab that phone number or that website? Probably not. They're just wanting you to recognize that name when you see it somewhere else. So it influences, but there's no direct ROI on that. It's the same way, though, if you think about it in these marketing systems where we're disconnected. So I send out an email, I send them to a form. That form maybe gets filled out, maybe it doesn't get filled out. Let's say that it's a quote form and it goes to a line of business. If that line of business is keeping all of their information in a different system, whether it's their own CRM portal or however they're managing stuff, and I don't get anything back, the best case scenario is that I hear from them, hey, I've seen an uptick a little bit in quote requests. But they might not know to attribute that to us. It could just be also be that, hey, yeah, we often see that around this time of the year because people have gone back to school. And so there's an uptick in student accounts that get opened. So that's really the biggest difficulty for us is that feedback loop. So that's why we're spending a lot of time right now shifting some of our forms to Salesforce and Marketing Cloud forms that stay within the system. Now that we've made the kind of that that decision corporately, that that's going to be our system of truth or one that everyone's going to be working out of, I want to contain as much of our information as possible within that, because that I can track. And then for those that are outside of the loop, and we can talk that about that uh uh a little bit later, like wealth, there's a different approach that we have to do with with with uh lines of business like that.
SPEAKER_00So, Jeff, let me let me draw you out on finding the institution's voice. So you guys are a community institution, and don't take this the wrong way. But in my experience and in my observation, community bank messaging and rhetoric is essentially the exact same across a country. And I totally get it. But how do you try to find an open lane for for the institution from a rhetoric perspective, from a messaging perspective? And and how do you do that without straying off-brand? It's difficult, right?
SPEAKER_01And we can talk a little bit about, you know, sometimes you can get away with more dependent upon the channel that you're going in. I mean, your your social media is probably the most playful that you can get, depending upon which social media platform you're you're on. And you can still keep the core elements of your brand, but your tone changes a little bit. I would say if I'm looking at this from a broader perspective, you want to work as hard as possible to learn as much as possible about your core customer because that's who you're who you're talking to for the majority. Now, this is different than hey, we're trying to reach into new markets, or we're kind of we're trying to disrupt. But I think having the best picture of your current customer allows you to fine-tune what that communication looks like. There was a reason they came to you. And if you can lean into that, I mean, that's really what we're doing at the community bank, right? We're trying to strengthen and establish these relationships. And we talked earlier about how we're mimicking that in the digital world. And we have to determine whether those communications match what the customer needs. I'm gonna add on the side though to the executive team. No matter what bank you're at or what creating union, the executive teams really need to determine whether our core customers match who we're trying to get and who we're trying to keep.
SPEAKER_00Sometimes I think that's the same go for your voice as well and just how you look at the world?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. That is exactly it. Sometimes there's a mismatch. And maybe that mismatch is because, well, this has worked for us, but then we take a look at what the strategic plan is or what we're trying to do. And I'm like, well, that audience isn't who we currently have. So are we willing to change what our voice and our brand kind of looks like to go after this, what we think is really our ideal? And by the way, from an operational standpoint, are we suited to take care of who we're going after? So, you know, if if let's say that you have a uh a HELOC program that isn't terribly robust or terribly strong or terribly fast, and you said, hey, we're gonna go after HELOC customers, that's who our bread and butter is gonna be for the next, you know, nine to twelve months. We we feel really strongly about this. But we don't have the operational wherewithal to be able to support them in a way that other institutions are, then we've got an operational problem. And I can do all the marketing in the world about getting people in the door to start that process. But if they leave incomplete or angry or with a bad experience, then we've kind of abandoned who we're our core folks were, and we've gone after a market that we're not being being very successful in. So I think that there's there's three three pieces that really have to be in alignment. So your executive team, your marketing team, and your operational team. And I think when they're in alignment and we all agree who our ideal customer is, then we can find that swim lane because what we're doing is we're talking to that customer in a way that's slightly different. I mean, you're right. Bank rhetoric is bank rhetoric. Hey, you know, we're great to work with, you know, we we're your local institution. Right. And and we're relationship focused, and your business matters to us. Well, your business matters to every bank that you're with, you know, and and until they show you that that that it's not. And how do they show that to you? By failing operationally, by missing the mark on on the communications, leaving a late fee.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's it. That's exact that's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that makes sense, right? Like you gotta really make sure, you gotta really look before you leap on a campaign. If you have, let's say, an older customer base, maybe you you don't want to do you don't want to do a six, seven uh billboard. Um be on little kids. So yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And by the way, we we also have a tendency to be about a year and a half behind on the trends, right? By the time that the fuddy duddies like me uh are trying to capture this youthful piece, it's already, you know, they're already hating on it by the time that we get it out there. So maybe we're appealing to their parents on the 6-7 thing. I do think that that's part of it, you know. There are certain expectations that people have from their bank. And what you can't stray from is you can you can be a little edgy in your conversation, you can be a little experimental in the way that you're dealing, you know, from a channel perspective, but you still have to demonstrate that you are a reliable and solid financial institution. Yeah. So that's fair. These are guardrails that are kind of in place that that limit us a little bit. So we have to find the creative creativity where we can.
SPEAKER_00And that's and that is you know really where some of the brilliant genius marketing stuff sits, right? Because in another playbook, there's somebody who's saying, Hey, what if we had a bunch of marauding Vikings ransacking up somewhere in you know, the Capital One commercials from 20 years ago? Absolutely. So it's that's like decorum is a thing, and you can off-road from it if you can find a way to do it tastefully, I guess. Right.
SPEAKER_01Because the the whole purpose of that particular thing was, yeah, you've got these Vikings and it's it's very disruptive in the way that it looks, but ultimately they're still saying bank with us, right? I mean, right, we're still a we're still a solid choice from a banking perspective. It's just that we're gonna have a little fun along the way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I've said this many times, and I feel like one of the highest ROI tones that you can have that we can have as a marketer in any industry is is comedy and humor. Yes. Because it just has such an inertia momentum about it. It gets shared, it gets, but that is so it's so hard to do, and it's hard to get an executive team to start thinking abstract like that in a way that feels that is comfortable for them. But anyways, that's we can we can take that one offline or or have another episode about it. I want to just talk a little bit about how you get buy-in from the executive team on trying something new. I've had managers who have said to me, Hey, look, like I'm gonna give you enough rope in this role to hang yourself, but I want you to kind of look before you leap and give me your thoughts on you know why you're gonna be doing this and why you think we should, as a business, invest in it. How do you get the organization's buy-in when you're trying to get them to go down a road that is, you know, not so explored?
SPEAKER_01So in my world, the easiest way to do that is probably in the world of email, I can do some simple A-B testing for smaller groups. Uh, your channels, the your social media channels, I think you that humor element, I think you could easily bring that in in a small cost and see what kind of traction you're getting on that. And if you're showing it in a small, small amount, another example would be Alchemy has this thing called web programmatic digital advertising. Really what it is, is uh it's like a little line of code they put on your website, and based upon people that have come either via your email or through the digital banking app, they click on it, they go over to the website and they start looking around, and we've got this component sitting down in there, we recognize who they are. They leave the website and we're gonna show them ads based upon where they were in our in our website. It does rely upon you having cookies in place, right? But the nice thing is I can control that budget to a very small amount. So I could spend $3,000 a month on testing this to see what sort of traction we're getting and what sort of leads are coming out of this. And then I can go back and say, well, this was a failure, or hey, here's how it worked. Can I have six thousand for the next couple of months and see do we see a trend that way uh that's going up? And if so, is this something that we can then mimic in other channels or other aspects in this type of approach? Um and you would do the same thing on your your digital ad spins. Yeah, I would do the same thing over in terms of acquired lists that we're getting. You know, it's one of the things that we don't do right now is we don't bring in a lot of what I would call coal lists in order to be able to market to from an email perspective. I would like to do it, but I would like to do it in a way where we can maybe do some comparisons from different groups where we're getting these lists.
SPEAKER_00And you're talking about like purchased lists. It is a purchased list. High net worth, millennials, Gen Z, you know, whatever. Right. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So we we dial into what that criteria looks like. Which is great that you can do that a lot more now. Used to it was well, here's the name of someone that lives in this zip code and good luck, right? So I do think that that's one of the easiest ways to do it is to start small. Don't try and take these big swings where you're spending lots of huge dollars because you could be undercutting money that you need later for other initiatives. And what if the initiative doesn't work? The whole idea is to determine whether or not something's worth pursuing. And you don't necessarily need to do everything on a grand scale. I tend to be more of a I love that. Keep keep that faucet dribbling and then open it slowly as you move along.
SPEAKER_00So uh, you know, the w the way that we do that here with Propagate is, and I think it's pretty similar. You know, we kind of look for like a small beach head to do a little experiment on, and and then if it works, you know, we can expand from there. And, you know, we can you can kind of expand the aperture on on experiments that show promise and are and are working and uh and kind of crawl walk run it, if you will. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I especially when you're looking at worlds that are are like ours, which where that marketing has been decentralized, and we're trying to show proof of concept and why all that budget should kind of be aggregated more centrally and then and then dispersed, which is kind of uh it's weird to think that it's revolutionary because it's not that way in other industries necessarily, but it is, especially at the community bank and and often at the uh credit union levels.
SPEAKER_00So, Jeff, uh, I understand that you guys are using Monday.com and you've deployed agents within Monday.com to you know run your campaign board, uh, you know, moving it from a simple list to a true intake system with you know multiple dashboards. This I think is a very difficult task for human beings, but agents make this you know much more approachable. Uh how is this working out for you?
SPEAKER_01So from my perspective, it has been great. Simply because we're a very lean team and we have I I've put some guardrails in place so that this AI agent is only going to do what I'm asking it to do. And I haven't given it as much license to move out on its own right now because we're kind of in the early stages. We talked about that start small and and grow big. So I've kind of locked things in fairly tight on what it can do, but I have given it the ability to come to me with questions and suggestions on things that it might want to do. And so we can basically we're having these conversations back and forth about does it make sense, does it not make sense? And I'm teaching it as we go along. And sometimes it teaches me. It brings up things that maybe I had not thought about in terms from a uh process standpoint. Is it is it sharing findings with you and saying, hey, what if we did this? It will do that. Or it'll make recommendations saying, hey, in the past we've been we've been approaching it this way. I think now, based upon the new data that we have or what what I'm bringing to the table when I bring in more information in, it says, hey, let's let's maybe shift our mindset or our goal. You know, originally this started out as I was going to have the agent just create a simple channel-specific board. So it was going to be an email board, it was going to be a social board, and then it was going to kind of try and connect these. And each time we were building, we realized, oh, we're building something bigger. And so we just kept expanding the lens a little bit and realizing this can be an entire marketing campaign intake process, no matter whether it's whether it's a social, whether it's email, whether it's digital, uh, whether it's going to be billboards, whether it's going to be an event-based type of marketing campaign. And it's really allowing us to kind of shift and create a marketing operations manual as opposed to just tracking a specific job.
SPEAKER_00So way to go, way to go monday.com, they apparently did something so so good for you guys that you allowed a little, you permitted a little bifurcation of your process because you guys are investing so much into Salesforce, but yet here's Monday kind of peeling off a little sliver of I don't want to say little sliver, but peeling off a little bit of what you would think you'd be using Salesforce for.
SPEAKER_01It yes, it is. Mainly because the this process is something that, you know, all of these different tools that are out there are great at at least one thing. And they're pretty good at several other things, and then they're okay at the rest. And, you know, and this this mindset is that everything has to be, you know, an all-in-one. Yes, we want a source of truth. We want it to be Salesforce CRM. Does it have to manage all of our processes that are internal to our team that really don't need to have visibility into other teams? One of the things that Monday.com allowed me to do now is I can connect my Chat GPT right to it. So I can have Monday.com manage part of it, and I can have ChatGPT manage another part of it. And so ChatGPT is telling me, hey, it's better for Monday.com to handle this inside because of API calls and things like that. Whereas I can manage this part out here, but we're documenting all of it within Monday.com. So when you go to Monday.com, you can see who's managing what based upon all the documentation that I have built into it. So that is something that I'm I'm really having fun playing with because then I'm also not bound by how Monday.com thinks everything should be handled. And really that's what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to build a system that is actually tool agnostic.
SPEAKER_00So, Jeff, talk to me about technical debt that you think other marketing teams in the community bank space are struggling with and how you guys may have solved for that.
SPEAKER_01I'd say that my recommendation is to take a close look at your marketing team's current process and discipline. It's easy to take a look at other technology gaps that are sitting out there, but honestly, it sometimes boils down to a lack of a reliable campaign operating system. So we were talking about what I'm kind of building over in Monday.com, right? Which is a larger piece than what I originally intended, but it's a happy accident, you know, that we started doing this. So I'm looking at, is there everyone should be asking themselves, is there one source of truth uh for what's running, why it's running, who owns it, and how success will be measured. So the sometimes marketing operations can also seem Frankenstein-like, just like the technology pieces and the data pieces are Frankenstein uh-like. So there's a brief somewhere, maybe, if you're doing briefs. There's assets that live somewhere else, like in a dam. You got your compliance feedback that's sitting in an email, or maybe your CRM. Your landing pages are sitting over in WordPress. Social is being scheduled separately. If you're lucky, you're doing it at least in Sprout where you can track some of that and manage everything. Paid media has its own naming convention. And some of the results, again, if you're lucky, are sitting in analytics, Tableau, or Power BI. So it's what I call, we would call the fragmented campaign context, right? So going back to the P-Lock conversation is six months after the campaign is ended, someone says, Hey, how did it perform? And you're suddenly running into all these different areas trying to figure out how do I cobble together a response based upon where we had this. So when you're adding AI into the mix, um, fixing that operational fragmentation becomes more urgent, not less. Because if you think about it, AI can help with the lift, right? So it can do a lot of this with the underlying systems and the process. It's doing all this stuff for me right over in Monday Duck. But it's really, if I don't have a good operation in place, it's it's actually helping manufacture the operational debt faster. So it's doing it's doing whatever's broken in a much more robust way. So it's it it's a it's a difficult situation. The worst type of accelerant. Yeah. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to fix what you're doing internally because you're trying to establish trust. Just like you are establishing trust between the bank and the customer, the credit union and the customer, you're trying to establish trust between yourself and the lines of business because you want to show them that you have your act together and that when they come to you with a request, you're not just taking orders, which I think tends to be the default, particularly when you start centralizing marketing and people only see marketing as do a flyer for me, do an email for me. They don't they don't think about you being the strategy piece.
SPEAKER_00A lot of Jeff, thanks so much for coming on the show, man. It's been great uh you know to hear about all the things that you're up to and all of your marketing experiments and and all the wins. Thank you.