We work closely with our lineup of all-star speakers to carefully craft an agenda that’s all about “how to” instead of “why you should.” By focusing on “how” instead of “why,” you will arm yourself with concrete ideas and strategies you can implement immediately. Nothing but practical ideas and actionable advice about the most critical branding, marketing and advertising problems facing financial marketers today — candid, direct, honest and focused on results.
Davis chronicled Umpqua’s growth and success in his books, Leading for Growth: How Umpqua Bank Got Cool and Created a Culture of Greatness and Leading Through Uncertainty: How Umpqua Bank Emerged from the Great Recession Better and Stronger Than Ever. Today, thanks to its innovative strategy, Umpqua Bank’s brand is universally admired around the world and across the entire financial industry.
By fusing his passion for style and design with the strategic principles of brand building and corporate culture, Ryan has created one of the world’s most admired and respected brands — Method, with 200 different products in four continents. In this featured keynote, Ryan explains why you need to put culture before process, and shares the secrets of differentiation in a highly commoditized and ultra-competitive industry.
In this featured keynote presentation, Dr. Berger will explore the forces that secretly control the choices we make every day. He blends business strategy, human psychology and social science to remove the cloak of invisibility from the external factors that influence people’s decisions, equipping you with practical tools to shape consumer choices and drive growth. This is a must-see presentation for anyone responsible for persuading others to take action.
In this keynote presentation, Dr. Seelig will teach you a set of tools that anyone can use to unlock their “Innovation Engine.” Demystify the creative process and learn the scientific methods that will allow you to unleash your true innovation potential and cultivate creativity across your organization.
The Financial Brand Forum 2017 kicks off May 17th. Don’t wait, time is running out!
Ron Tite is an award-winning advertising executive who has worked with many of the world’s most respected brands, including Microsoft, Kraft, Johnson & Johnson, Volvo, Hershey and Xerox. He is one of the most highly rated (and funny) speakers in the world on the subjects of creativity, innovation and corporate strategy. In his humorous and insightful speech, Ron will help financial marketers craft content that truly resonates in today’s Expression Economy.
Kelly McDonald is considered one of the nation’s top experts in multicultural marketing and consumer trends, helping brands such as Toyota, State Farm, Nike and Harley-Davidson target niche segments. She is the best-selling author of two books, and Advertising Age has twice named her company one of the top ad agencies in the U.S. Kelly will help you understande the importance of embracing diversity marketing, and why your institution must tailor both its products and messages in ways that acknowledge consumers’ socio-cultural differences.
Jim Marous is one of the world’s foremost authorities on retail banking, financial services innovation and consumer trends. As an author and co-publisher of The Financial Brand, Jim advises on digital transformation, the customer experience, marketing strategies, retail delivery models, and mobile channels. Jim has been featured by CNBC, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, and Forbes. He has delivered keynote presentations to audiences around the globe, and has also advised the White House on banking policy.
Brad Montgomery teaches business leaders how to use their internal culture to boost productivity, creativity, innovation and profits. Brad has inspired and energized audiences in all 50 states and on four different continents, using humor, interactivity and multimedia to ignite a sense of passion and purpose. His clients include Microsoft, Verizon, the FBI, the CIA and the IRS. Brad will show you how to take your financial institution to a higher level by creating and sustaining positivity, optimism and meaningfulness across your team.
Don MacDonald joined MX as the company’s first Chief Marketing Officer, bringing with him more than 25 years of experience in communications, product development and strategy for companies including Intel, Fiserv and Qualcomm. He spent two decades at Intel building the brand to be the 5th most valuable in the world. In 2008, MacDonald joined Fiserv as CMO, focusing on refining the organization’s brand and product strategies, delivering strategic and market insights to help financial institutions across North America.
Roxanne Emmerich is one of America’s most sought-after workplace transformation experts. As President and CEO of The Emmerich Group, Inc. she has worked with many of the financial industry’s biggest and most admired institutions, as well as clients including Merck, Pfizer, Allianz and Lockheed Martin. Roxanne’s book Thank God It’s Monday! was #1 on Amazon’s business bestseller list and was also listed as a best-seller by the Wall Street Journal. She has appeared on national media outlets like CNN, NPR, and CBS for her talent helping businesses get unstuck and achieve radically improved results.
Digital marketing is changing the way financial institutions reach new customers. Is your strategy adapting to the changing ways that consumers now shop for financial products? This fast-paced, hands-on session will bring together all the necessary components of a successful digital marketing strategy, and show you best practices for developing an ROI-focused approach.
You know it’s essential to connect with new account holders in their first 90 days, but most institutions aren’t doing enough to target them. A successful cross-selling strategy hinges on delivering the right offers at the right time. In this three-hour workshop, you will learn how to up your game with a cross-selling strategy that increases your share-of-wallet and accelerates the profitability of both new and current account holders.
Aligning marketing initiatives and execution is critical to the overall success of your financial institution. In this informative workshop, you will learn proven, data-driven strategies to significantly increase accountholder acquisition, growth, and profitability. Learn the best practices today’s banking providers use to successfully tackle accountholder growth and engagement. This workshop will show you how to optimize your product strategies, policies and procedures, and sales processes to remove barriers to account acquisition. You will also learn effective, multi-channel targeted marketing strategies that yield superior performance.
The ultimate goal of any loan marketing program is to generate more credit applications from quality customers as cost-effectively as possible. In this workshop, you will learn how to market lending products to both current account holders and new prospects in ways that will generate the highest ROI for your financial institution. Take loan marketing to a higher level — learn the strategies and proven techniques that will most efficiently achieve the best results in your future loan acquisition campaigns.
Brands today face an existential challenge: innovate or die. Today’s brands can’t hide — consumers demand transparency and a brand’s ability to adapt to consumer expectations is critical to their success. It is survival of the fittest, and only those brands that can create meaningful connections and provide tangible value to their audiences will be the ones that survive. Branding in the financial industry presents an even greater challenge: consumer engagement is low and differentiation is near impossible.
Lasting success comes not from battling competitors in an already crowded marketplace, but by creating a “blue ocean” of opportunity — a new, untapped new space ripe for growth. That’s the driving principle behind the Blue Ocean strategy.
Based on the international bestseller that has sold more than four million copies, this approach is built on a decade-long study of more than 150 strategic moves spanning over 30 different industries. This rich, multi-media workshop includes interactive exercises that will give participants a practical jumpstart on developing their own Blue Ocean strategy.
Transactional efficiency is being displaced by a customer experience that drives engagement and grows market share. Study after study proves that when consumers need loans and credit-based products, they prefer face-to-face human interaction in a branch.
In this workshop, you will learn how to construct an omni-channel branch experience — one that drives results by making emotional connections with both consumers and your community. This workshop brings substantive clarity and purpose to branches, and includes a step-by-step plan that produces returns for stakeholders.
Nancy Harhut,
Chief Creative Officer at the Wilde Agency
The emerging field of decision-science will soon have a game-changing effect on how marketers communicate. More and more evidence is uncovered every day by social scientists, neuroscientists, and behavioral economists that proves people are hard-wired to behave in ways that follow predictable patterns. Even though consumers think they are in control, the fact is they make up to 95% of their purchase decisions subconsciously — automatically and instinctively. And these automatic behaviors can be prompted! This has huge implications for how financial institutions approach marketing — how you design pages and display ads, structure offers, write subject lines and craft content. By injecting these proven principles of social science into your marketing campaigns, you will significantly increase both engagement and response rates.
What You’ll Learn:
Joe Meier, Principal Analytical Lead at Google
Online advertising revolutionized marketing measurement, but now mobile has revolutionized the digital space. Over 75% of online adults ages 18–54 start an activity on one device, then continue (or finish) it on another. 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby ultimately visit a brick-and-mortar location that same day. But many financial brands are still relying on legacy desktop marketing metrics to drive strategy in a world that’s gone mobile. Mobile creates massive new opportunities to engage with consumers for financial institutions that rethink their business objectives and ROI metrics.
What You’ll Learn:
Jim Dellavilla, Chief Client Officer at Catalyst
If you’re not thinking about your switching process, you are overlooking one of the most powerful tools financial institutions can use to boost acquisition. Financial marketers frequently talk about products and offers, but there’s no emphasis on switching… which is exactly where many potential customers stall. Consumers perceive the switching process as an unsavory, complicated and arduous chore. And who can blame them? The inconvenience of changing automatic payments, automatic billing and debit cards is a major pain. In this session, you will learn five ways you can overcome inertia by optimizing your switching process.
What You’ll Learn:
With the exponential explosion of new marketing channels, it is increasingly critical to determine precisely what is driving sales. How should you balance spend across multiple channels and justify your budget? Many financial marketers still rely on intuition and gut instinct. This session focuses on the tangible ways in which you can increase marketing ROI, with practical examples tailored to the needs of community/regional banks and credit unions. Includes lessons you can take home and implement immediately.
What You’ll Learn:
Not long ago, Radius Bank had six branches. Today, with just one branch, Radius effectively serves customers in all 50 states through a digital retail platform built with an amalgamation of fintech partnerships. In this session, Radius will show you how to leverage a combination of digital marketing and innovative fintech solutions so you too can attract deposits from customers across the nation. Learn what works, what doesn’t, and what to avoid from an experienced team that spent their time in the trenches.
What You’ll Learn:
In a dynamically shifting world, it’s critical that your institution’s overarching strategic plan align everything together — your growth goals, the evolution of your retail delivery channels, your internal culture and your external brand experiences. If you’re not using the power of data analytics to drive these decisions and tie your strategy together, you’re behind the curve.
In this session, you’ll learn how leading financial institutions are leveraging insights gleaned through data analytics to achieve strategic clarity and improve their marketing ROI.
What You’ll Learn:
Jim Perry, Senior Strategist at Market Insights
Throughout the financial services industry, there is growing awareness that culture is critical to the customer experience and marketing success. Yet despite clearly stated missions, visions, and values, many banks and credit unions end up with a jumble of employee behaviors and practices that diminish productivity and limit success.
At a time when staff roles are evolving, senior talent is leaving and workforce requirements are changing; culture ends up happening whether you focus on it, or not. This session will look past the obvious tactics of influencing culture through training and hiring; and share the practical, everyday practices that bank and credit union leaders can utilize to actively and intentionally shape their culture.
What You’ll Learn:
Steven Ramirez
CEO at Beyond the Arc
New technologies and emerging channels are generating rich sources of valuable data. To grow, up/cross-sell and retain relationships, financial marketers must learn how to turn this data into rich insights. That’s why predictive targeted marketing has quickly become one of the most powerful strategies available to financial institutions today. This session will show you how to significantly improve marketing outcomes, produce higher response rates and increase ROI without a proportional increase in marketing costs. Includes case studies and real-world examples.
What You’ll Learn:
Melissa Musgrove, VP/Head of Social Media at Regions Bank
Regions Bank is undeniably one of the most successful financial institutions in the world when it comes to social media. They are active in no less than nine different social networks, including Facebook (236,000 Likes), Twitter (20,000 Followers), YouTube (4.8 million video views), and LinkedIn (45,000 Followers). This is your opportunity to learn firsthand from Melissa Musgrove, VP/Head of Social Media at Regions, who will show you how to approach your strategy, craft your content, and leverage social media channels to achieve business objectives.
What You’ll Learn:
Kesna Lawrence, Chief Data Scientist at Deluxe
Financial marketers are struggling to translate their traditional campaigns into new digital channels, and most haven’t deciphered the omni-channel riddle. With the massive volume of data that’s now available right at your fingertips, audience profiling has reached new levels of sophistication making it possible to target the same prospects in every channel with a consistent, specific message that drives real results.
What You’ll Learn:
Shelly Loftin, Chief Marketing Officer at Bear State Bank
You can have a differentiated brand strategy that’s supported by smart marketing and world-class ad campaigns. But it all means nothing if your staff fail to create an experience aligned with your brand’s promises. In order for your brand to thrive, employees must be on-board, but if you aren’t evaluating and rewarding staff for on-brand behaviors, they won’t care. It’s this simple: anything that isn’t measured and rewarded doesn’t matter. In this session, Bear State Bank will show you how they engage employees and encourage them to “live the brand” with an employee rewards program consistent with their culture.
What You’ll Learn:
Ed Boyle, Managing Director of Fidor Americas at Fidor Bank
Can a retail financial institution build its own social media platform? Yes. That’s basically what Fidor, a wildly respected, all-digital branchless bank in Germany, did. At The Financial Brand Forum, learn how Fidor uses its community to acquire new customers, increase retention, drive Net Promoter Scores and lower operating costs by strategically incentivizing and rewarding people for various digital behaviors. Fidor will share examples of how they engage their community, and provide statistics regarding growth, sell-through rates, costs and satisfaction levels.
What You’ll Learn:
Rick Hall, Managing Director of Banking and Financial Services at BKM Marketing
A combination of forces are driving consolidation in the banking industry — increasing regulatory pressures, rising compliance costs, and the massive technology investments required to compete in the Digital Age. Few communications opportunities carry more weight — or more risk — than the first impressions created during a merger. What can financial institutions do to make customers at an acquired institution view a merger positively? How should you engage employees and other key stakeholders? What can the acquiring institution do to mitigate customer attrition? And how can you effectively manage this intensive, critical moment while staying on top of your regular responsibilities?
What You’ll Learn:
Chris J. Snook, Author of Digital Sense and Brand Humanizer At Large
The lines between “marketing” and the “experience” blur more and more every day, requiring financial marketers to focus their attention squarely on CX. In this session, Chris J. Snook, the best-selling author of Digital Sense will show you how to use an Experience Marketing Framework to effectively engineer a 360 degree marketing plan that delivers measurable ROI. In the Digital Age, achieving amazing marketing results hinges on delivering amazing customer experiences.
What You’ll Learn:
Andrew Davidson,
SVP/Chief Insights Officer at Mintel
In today’s time-constrained, hyper-wired world, the power of images is immeasurably valuable. You have just seconds to get your message across, and marketers must communicate more efficiently than ever before. As speed, convenience and ease-of-use become increasingly critical to consumers, the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” couldn’t be more true. This session will break down what this means to financial marketers, showcasing brands and campaigns that are on the cutting edge of this important trend.
What You’ll Learn:
Dave DeFazio, Partner at StrategyCorps
A handful of companies like Facebook, Starbucks and Über have raised the bar in the mobile channel, radically redefining consumers’ expectations. What mobile apps do people love, and how do they prefer to interact with them? This session will focus on live demonstrations of the mobile apps that are reimagining everyday banking tasks, and show you what your institution needs to do to keep up. Live demos include: Venmo, Simple, Digit, Penny, Uber, Amazon, Bank of America, and Starbucks.
What You’ll Learn:
Wil Reynolds
Director of Digital Strategy
Seer Interactive
As a financial marketer, your job is to help people find solutions to problems. But how can you tell whether someone searching for a “home loan” is just a dreamer vs. an actual buyer, and how might you market to each group separately? Search engines can give you the answers you need. Google isn’t just a SEO “ranking engine” — it’s a rich analytics tool that can bring you closer to your customers and accelerate your marketing ROI.
In this session, you’ll learn how today’s advanced marketer can use Google to better understand consumers and how to ensure you give them what they truly want. As one of the world’s foremost authorities on SEO and search strategies, Wil will show you how to turn keyword analysis into a research engine that generates actionable marketing insights. A mix of both strategy and tactics, this presentation will change the way you look at Google forever.
What You’ll Learn:
Korey Thurber, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Harte Hanks
With traditional media, accurately assessing and quantifying marketing success wasn’t easy — how much business could a financial institution attribute to their TV, print, radio or direct mail campaigns? However, with the rise of digital channels and identity resolution, the promise of marketing measurement and attribution is now a reality. Today, there is no excuse. Robust attribution solutions rooted in statistical techniques and mathematical fundamentals have become a critical part of the modern marketer’s toolbox. In this session, you will learn about the different attribution models used today, which ones work, which ones don’t, and how to get your attribution solution off the ground.
What You’ll Learn:
Michael Balsimo, Former VP/Marketing Officer at Peoples Bank
When Peoples Bank realized that 39% of the their customers had only one or two accounts after banking with them for at least a year, their marketing team knew it had to improve cross-sell ratios and increase adoption rates for the bank’s digital services. Find out how Peoples Bank is engaging digital consumers in ways that produce greater retention rates, higher balances and more revenues.
What You’ll Learn:
Bill Handel, VP/Research & Development at Raddon, a Fiserv company
Small businesses are an attractive segment for financial institutions looking to diversify their earnings and accelerate growth. Unfortunately, two out of every three small businesses are already doing business with a megabank. How can you go toe to toe with the industry’s biggest players and hope to be competitive? What technology and product deficiencies might be holding you back, and how can you bridge these gaps? This session will show you how your institution can more effectively meet the needs of small businesses, and where you need to address their priorities and preferences in your marketing.
What You’ll Learn:
Meredith Olmstead, Founding Partner at SocialStairway
For years financial institutions have been using Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Pandora as content marketing channels and to build communities around their brands. But can these social networks be used for more than just “engagement?” How can social channels be used to advertise banking products like home loans, auto loans and checking accounts? This session answers financial marketers’ big questions about paid social media marketing programs — from what lookalike campaigns on Facebook cost, to how pre-roll campaigns on YouTube work. Includes examples and case studies.
What You’ll Learn:
Pete Koomen, Co-Founder and CTO at Optimizely
In a digital world, marketers should be testing everything — from their ads and landing pages, to their email subject lines and calls-to-action. Even testing something as simple as one button that says “Click Here” vs. one that says “Learn More” can have a staggering impact, with the winner generating four times as many clicks. In this session, you’ll learn how to use the power of experimentation to magnify and accelerate your marketing ROI, with case studies, best practices, and lessons learned from hundreds of thousands of real-world tests.
What You’ll Learn:
David Sosna, CEO & Co-Founder at Personetics
Consumers are saturated with marketing. Financial institutions must find new ways to engage consumers, especially across digital channels. By delivering timely, personalized, and highly contextualized offers to each individual, financial marketers can dramatically increase engagement and response rates that go well beyond any conventional cross-selling strategies.
What You’ll Learn:
Craig McLaughlin, CEO of Extractable
The banking industry is finally waking up to the importance of digital channels and is starting to accept that “design thinking” is a crucial internal core capability. The stakes have never been higher. In this practical and prescriptive session, learn how the most effective ways that you can quickly evolve your digital presence with a comprehensive digital strategy that addresses your fundamental business goals vs. just bolting on the features of the latest ‘fintech du jour’.
What You’ll Learn:
Tim Bennett, Chief Brand Officer at TDECU
Many financial institutions expend considerable effort developing a brand strategy hoping for a “North Star” that will guide everything the organization does. Unfortunately, these well-intentioned brand strategies frequently fall short and are often quickly forgotten. This session will expose the common flaws, challenges and shortcomings of weak brand strategies built on outmoded models and techniques. Discover a fresh approach to building brand strategies and learn new branding methods that can truly guide your organization — from marketing and the customer experience, to product development and employee behaviors.
What You’ll Learn:
Jim Dicso, CEO at SundaySky
Consumers don’t want just information. They expect content that’s tailored to their immediate needs and interests, and want digital experiences that are both personalized and highly relevant. By leveraging people’s data profiles, video messages can be personalized in real-time, driving them to take the next-best action. With video, you can leverage the full power of sight, sound, and motion to create the most engaging and captivating storytelling content today.
What You’ll Learn:
Steve Rice, EVP at EverFi
For most banks and credit unions, a financial education program is a central component of their content marketing strategy. But can it also contribute to the bottom line? Research has proven that financial education builds trust and loyalty with consumers, thereby providing valuable opportunities to deepen relationships. This session will illustrate how institutions can embrace financial education in ways that engage consumers and help capture greater value from them.
What You’ll Learn:
Brennie Conkle,
VP/Customer Strategy at Invoca
In an analysis of over 50 million phone calls to financial institutions’ contact centers, 74% originated with interactions in digital marketing channels. Not only are calls pouring in from digital channels, but they convert at 10 times the rate of those who purely click. Financial marketers may have dismissed the phone as an antiquated point of contact within the modern omnichannel landscape, but new tools and technologies actually bridge the gap between inbound calls and your digital marketing strategy.
What You’ll Learn:
Robert McKinnon, Practice Leader/Financial Services at SiriusDecisions
There is no shortage of marketing automation platforms out there to choose from today — Salesforce/Pardot, Marketo, HubSpot, IBM/Silverpop, Oracle/Eloqua, Adobe Marketing Cloud. But which one is right for a $5 billion community bank? Or a $500 million credit union? This session will explore the pros and cons of the major automation platforms available today. What features are essential, and which ones can you do without? How much do they cost? How easy are they to learn and implement?
What You’ll Learn:
The Financial Brand Forum 2017 kicks off May 17th. Register now, before it's too late!