In our spring issue of this magazine, I mentioned that ICBA had launched their national “BankLocally.org” marketing campaign to educate the American public on the benefits of community banking and why their choice of bank matters. The timing of that launch could not have been more perfect given what was going on in the banking world with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and, later, First Republic Bank. I also mentioned that Jim Brown and I had connected with ICBA’s VP of Marketing, Rob Birgfeld, to start the conversation on how the MIB could coordinate with their national campaign with a slight change to rebrand it as “BankLocallyMontana.org” for our organization to bring focus to our MIB member banks. The following is an update on this endeavor.

From the moment we started talking with Rob Birgfeld at ICBA about our idea, he fully supported it and was very enthusiastic about a state association picking it up and running with it at the state level. Jim and I invited Carol Blodgett with Blodgett Marketing, who had helped us run our previous digital marketing campaign, to join conversations on how to get the best bang for our marketing dollar. We quickly focused on a series of 15- and 30-second video ads that ICBA had created, as they were, by all accounts, very well done. The problem was that, due to production and talent rights, the video couldn’t be changed to add our “BankLocallyMontana.org” spin on it. However, with Rob seeing that this could be something all state associations may potentially want to do, he committed to working on the production and talent rights to allow us to use it.

With some considerable effort on Rob’s part, he was able to secure the right for MIB to use one of the videos known as “The Tube.” The downside is that everything costs money, and it was going to take some to get these rights extended. When Rob let us know this, he mentioned that ICBA was willing to absorb the additional cost if we, as an organization, were willing to share the market data from our state-level campaign. In addition, he requested that MIB be willing to act as a model for other ICBA state associations to use. We, of course, agreed. With all the pieces in place, we launched a three-month “BankLocallyMontana.org” marketing campaign on September 15.

The type of digital marketing we decided to use is known as pre-roll. These are video advertisements that appear on high-brand, high-traffic, trusted websites before a featured video. We have all experienced these after clicking on a news or sports video segment, and a video ad pops up that we must watch before we can continue.

Results from the first two weeks of the campaign have been very positive. There have been roughly 86,000 completed views of the video statewide. That’s roughly 5,700 views per day since the campaign launched. This has led to a significant increase in our Montana Independent Bankers website traffic, specifically the “Find a Community Bank” page, with over 1,800 views. The “Find a Community Bank” page lists several reasons why banking with an independent community bank is important and includes a listing of our member banks with website and location information.

It is exciting to be a part of such a new and innovative push for local community banking, and it is a tremendous privilege to be the first state association to activate a more locally centralized campaign. I look forward to sharing the updated market data as it comes in and hope to quickly launch a larger variety of these segments into our local communities. The larger hope underlying this great effort is that all our MIB member banks see a rising interest in local banking across our beautiful state.