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Online advertising is a digital marketing strategy you might have heard a lot about, but you may be unsure how it can have a positive effect on your goals. There are at least four ways running a smart ad campaign can benefit you. Consider these when you’re thinking about launching an ad campaign on Google, Bing, Facebook or any other popular online platform.

Creating Brand Awareness

If you’re a small local bank or credit union with just one branch who is trying to compete with six big banks in town, it can be hard to be noticed. It can be challenging to compete on their level with the advertising budgets and name recognition they already have.

Ads can help you catch up by building brand awareness. They can put your logo, branding and your message in front of the right audience at the right time while they’re active online. These types of ads can get tens of thousands of views. They can also get repeated views by the same people which can build up name recognition. That can translate to a better return on other marketing or advertising you’re doing elsewhere.

Driving Website Traffic

Your website is really important and can act as an interactive brochure about your financial institution. However, if your site doesn’t have much new traffic coming in or account holders who are only coming to login into their accounts, it’s not working for you in all the ways that it could. That can be just a matter of not driving the right audience to your site.

Online ads are a very quick and effective way to get traffic from people interested in opening a savings account or applying for a loan. They’re already going to Google and looking up websites to get this information. So, if you’re not visibly there, you’re missing out on an easy source of traffic. Online ads are your quickest way to getting listed.

Driving People to your Branches

Website traffic is great but getting shoes in the door can be even better. Ads that drive up awareness can lead to more visits to your store, which is now semi-tracked thanks to an update from Google Analytics. Your ads can also show location information if a person is physically nearby a branch. Ads are also eligible to show on Google Maps, which is great for people who are looking for something nearby

Building Engagement

We know that the end goal for your marketing initiatives is to have more account holders, more loans, or more deposits. It does take time to get a person to close the deal on things like that, but these are not the only goals you can measure. You can use online advertising to grow other areas of engagement, which can eventually lead to those big end-result goals.

So perhaps growing email marketing signups is important for turning an interested person into a new account holder over time. You can use online ads to drive up subscriptions. If you’d like to increase social media likes and follows, you can run campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and other platforms to drive up those numbers. Whatever key points along the customer journey you can grow that will eventually drive new accounts, that is something online ads can help you with.

Which of these benefits is most important for your financial institution? Contact us to learn more about how online ads can work towards these benefits and get a free proposal with cost estimates from our team.