Most financial institution websites do a reasonably good job closing the sale. The challenge now is to increase the flow of qualified prospects. With more than 300 million searches conducted each day worldwide (Table 1), the best place to find new customers online is still the search engine results page.
It used to be that it was cost prohibitive for all but the biggest banks to run banners on search engines. Today, with the advent of small pay-per-click (PPC) display ads, the economics of search-engine advertising are much different. It no longer requires a six-figure advertising budget. Self-service account management has done away with minimums and can be very cost effective, so long as you target the right keywords (Table 4). Bottom line: a community bank or credit union can target searchers in its own market for just a few hundred dollars per month.
Contents
Search engine marketing:
— Banking search term selection tool
— Most popular banking, credit, and lending keywords
— Google AdWords
— Overture, LookSmart, and others
Case Study
— Searching for mortgage prospects
— Mortgage keywords
Email marketing
— Recent examples from financial institutions
Innovations
— KnowYourLoanRate from TrueCredit
— NationalCity.com joins the 1 million club
Conference calendar
Wells Fargo places first on the latest Gomez ranking