Eric Morse is a man on a mission. For three years now, he’s been working on Switch to Community, a viral marketing effort set to launch this week that he hopes will push disgruntled big bank customers toward community banks.
Morse, also the marketing director at Needham Bank, conceived of the idea while running Caber Partners, a financial services consulting practice, as a way to tackle what he sees as a public perception that community banks are somehow second-rate to giants like Wells Fargo or Citibank.
“If you’re thinking about some esoteric overnight currency swap product, clearly you can’t get that at a community bank,” he concedes. “But most of the financial services and products people use, what you can get at a big bank is available at a community bank, too.”
In March 2011, Morse sat down with a room full of community bank presidents and proposed that they pool their resources for a big marketing budget that would drive people to SwitchToCommunity.com, where visitors could rant about their big bank, read heart-warming stories about local banks’ good deeds and ultimately find a community bank in their ZIP code, should they decide to make the switch.
There was just one problem with that plan.
“This is a great idea,” Morse recalled those bankers saying to him, “but the amount of money we would each have to contribute to this pooled marketing budget is too much for us to afford.”
That’s where GetFused came in.
Steve Mammone, president of the Boston-based digital marketing firm, met Morse through his involvement with Dedham Square Circle, another organization with a similar “go local” ethos. Mammone was impressed with Morse’s passion, and the “bank local” theme resonated with him. But traditional marketing? Not so much.
“Traditional marketing is this blunt force: you’re going to throw a lot of money at a lot of marketing and hopefully it’s going to resonate, but there’s really no way to track whether these radio ads or commercials are inspiring people to come to the site,” he said.
ABCs Of SEO
Mammone urged Morse toward a more organic approach, using search engine optimization to drive people to the site when they are searching for specific banking phrases. The idea, he said, is for Switch to Community to itself become an online banking-oriented community, kind of like the reddit of banking.
“It could be anything from a Jon Stewart video to an article on something a big bank was doing that they shouldn’t have been, or a great article about how this bank was doing something that positively affected the community,” Mammone said.
Data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) suggests that Morse’s message may hit a wider audience than even he is anticipating.
The ACSI has been tracking consumer satisfaction with financial institutions for 20 years now, Managing Director David VanAmburg said, and its data consistently show that customers of community banks and credit unions report greater satisfaction with their banking experience than those at the big nationals. The industry-wide average last year was a score of 77 out of 100 points, but smaller banks earned an average score of 79. Even the highest-rated big bank (Chase) scored just a 74 in comparison.
“It suggests that when you get to a smaller institution, there tends to be better customer service and a greater likelihood that you’re not being treated like just a number,” VanAmburg said.
“It’s a cliché but it’s true: that hometown feel, the sense that when you walk into a bank, they know you and they treat you like they appreciate your business,” he said.
Though Switch to Community only launched this week, a few community bankers have caught wind of Morse’s project and signed on. While it was totally separate from his work at Needham Bank, they’ve still agreed to participate, said Richard Buttermore, executive vice president of marketing and retail sales.
Michael Apelian, a senior vice president at Broward Bank of Commerce down in Florida, stumbled upon the site by chance and decided he’d like the $150 million bank to get in on the ground floor.
Broward Bank of Commerce doesn’t do much paid marketing, he said, but if Switch to Community picks up steam, he’d certainly like to see their name pop up when a disgruntled Bank of America customer goes searching for a hometown bank in South Florida.
And while the site is still in its infancy, Switch to Community can already boast its first success story. When Mammone was working on the site, he realized he was fed up with his big bank, so he switched to a community bank.
Email: lalix@thewarrengroup.com
