Sherri May & Co.

You’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars equipping your branches with signage and brochures, you’ve shipped the collateral for your next campaign and when you walk into the branch, the signs they have up are from six months ago with the new ones still in their tubes in a storage closet. Checking the brochure rack, you find two revisions out of date along with some buckslips from a special promotion that’s long past. Sound familiar? It happens everywhere, so don’t feel alone. Here are a few ideas to clean up your collateral system:

Box it Baby – For key initiatives, like your big promotions, kit all of the material together and send a “Campaign in a Box,” complete with placement instructions (plan-o-gram), sales readiness materials and any supporting education. When materials arrive piecemeal, you’re almost asking for things to get lost! This may require bumping up your production calendar by a week or so, but it will be well worth it. If you use a single source vendor, they will often do this for you.

Make it Obvious – When updating brochures, instead of maintaining the same cover and just making interior changes, redesign the cover (even if only a key color) so it’s immediately obvious to anyone checking if there’s an old straggler in the brochure rack.

Build a Retail Partnership – Too often branch teams view new marketing material as just another task imposed on them by “downtown.” Team up with managers at all levels to involve them in the process. Help them understand you’re goal is to help them meet their sales and service goals. Encourage feedback and have a thick skin, remember not every one of your employees is in the target audience for each piece of material. Thank them for their contributions and incorporate them into future revisions. Always remember marketing’s highest purpose is to provide the tools to help bankers close sales. As a marketer, if you approach your Retail Partnership with this mindset, you’ll definitely be heading in the right direction!

Communication…Communication…Communication – It’s easy for those of us in staff roles to forget that, in BranchLand, they have a ridiculous number of masters … usually in the two-dozen range! Every line of business wants top billing in the branch “share of mind,” audit is always around the corner, they really do have to pay attention to security, and then there’s the customer! Find a simple, direct way to notify bankers of what’s headed down the pike and continually reinforce the benefits of the materials you push their way.

Just in Time – Sending material a month in advance may get it off your plate, but it will be forgotten by launch time. Sending material too late doesn’t give branches time to prepare and can send the message that, at best, you really “don’t get” branch challenges and at worst that marketing doesn’t have it’s act together. Have you heard that before? After many years and hundreds of campaigns, we find the happy medium that gets the best results on both sides of the marketing fence is to ensure materials arrive two weeks prior to campaign launch. This gives managers the first week to prepare. Week two is communication week in preparation for launch the following week.

Go Digital – This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I joined the “place-based marketing” movement in the late 80s and saw first-hand the power of a digital marketing network in a financial services environment. Systems have come a long way since then and today, more and more banks are either replacing or supplementing static marketing with digital monitors. Anywhere you have customers “captive” (behind the teller line, near the banker waiting area or in kiosks in the lobby, even in the drive-thru) you have the opportunity to deliver sales and service messages. These systems allow you, the marketing team, to broadcast directly into the branch.

Finally, if you’re really serious about ensuring branches are up-to-date on the materials they display, look for my next post where I’ll discuss how to implement “Tidy-Up Team.”