Scroll through any community bank's social feed. You'll find rate posts, holiday closures, "we're hiring," and the occasional stock photo with a tagline. But one thing you usually won't find is high post engagement, because there's not much to engage with. Most banks do the media part of social media well, but need to focus more on the social part.

The banks getting real traction on social don't post much about products. They post about people, community, and live events. This week, Dan and Chris talk through how to stop posting like a bank, and how to turn social media from a broadcast channel into actual conversations.

• How the social media algorithm works against you (and other banks)

• The litmus test: would a human actually stop scrolling for this?

• How to get real stories flowing from your branches back to the marketing team

• Why compliance doesn't have to kill creativity — and a free FFIEC social media compliance overview you can request

• Giveaways, content buckets, and the 15-minutes-a-day approach to real engagement

• Want the FFIEC social media compliance overview? Reach out: contact@bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

At most community banks, marketing puts out ads and tries to pull people in the door. Lending makes calls, shakes hands at Chamber meetings, and occasionally asks marketing for a brochure. Both teams are trying to bring more business into the bank, but only coordinate infrequently.

Community banking is built on relationships, but the relationship between marketing and lending is often not given the attention it deserves. In this episode, Dan and Chris make the case that connecting these two teams gives a bank serious advantage over others still operating in silos.

• Why marketing and lending are running on parallel tracks at most banks — and what both teams are missing because of it

• Three ideas for connecting inbound and outbound marketing and sales efforts

• How marketing can make a lender's cold call a warm one

• What lenders can give marketing that no amount of research will surface on its own

• Want to talk about how your marketing can better support your lending team? Reach out: contact@bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

Last episode, we told you to go ask AI about your bank. If you did, you probably didn't
love what you found. We gave you some actionable next steps, but we go much further
into the "Now what?" this week.

Most of the mass market AEO advice out there is written for e-commerce companies
and big local service businesses that live and die on web traffic. Community banks don't
operate that way. AI visibility is still important, but there are some things you should do
differently when your goal is trust-building and engagement, versus maximum web
traffic. Dan and Chris break it down into four concrete steps you can do on your own,
starting this week, with no budget and no developer.

In this episode:
• Four steps to improve your AI visibility, that you can do now
• Why your local competitors and digital competitors are not the same
• A technical step that nearly no community banks have done, that you can have
AI write for you
• How getting started puts you ahead of 90% of community banks
Resources:
• Google's Rich Results Test for checking your schema:
search.google.com/test/rich-results
• Want a deeper AI visibility audit? Reach out: contact@bankmarketingshow.com
• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com
• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com
• Contact: contact@bankmarketingshow.com

Go ask ChatGPT or Claude who the best bank in your town is. Or ask Google AI where to get a small business loan in your county. See what comes back. If your bank isn't in the answer — or worse, if a competitor is — that's not a future problem. That's happening right now, every time a potential customer asks AI for a recommendation instead of typing "bank near me" into Google.

This isn't a traditional search ranking issue. People are having conversations with AI — asking real questions in plain language about real problems. And AI is answering based on what it can find. If your website says "your trusted financial partner" and nothing else, there's nothing for it to work with.

In this episode, Dan and Chris walk through how to audit your bank's AI visibility, why most community banks are invisible in AI results, and what to do about it — starting this week.

• How to audit your AI visibility right now — and why you should search as a customer, not as a banker

• Why generic messaging makes you invisible to AI — and the difference between ranking for a keyword and being the answer to a question

• The thin content problem: why a bullet-point feature list isn't enough anymore

• Why getting specific about your geographies, your customer types, and your specialties makes you more findable — not more narrow

• Who you're competing against online may not be who you think you're competing against on the ground

• Reach out for a deeper AI visibility audit: contact@bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

• Contact: contact@bankmarketingshow.com

Every community bank knows they need to differentiate. But how? Most banks skip the hard part — figuring out what the market actually looks like from the customer's perspective — and jump straight to writing a tagline. The result? Messaging that sounds like every other bank in town.

The answer is whitespace: the gap between what your competitors are saying and what your ideal customers actually need to hear. Find that gap, and you have a marketing message people will pay attention to. Miss it, and you're just adding to the noise.

In this episode, Dan and Chris walk through a four-step process for identifying whitespace in your market and turning it into messaging that resonates with the customers you're trying to reach. The process builds on the AI and competitive analysis topics covered in recent episodes and the Kadince webinar — including a live competitive analysis demo available at bankmarketingshow.com.

In this episode:

• Why most competitive analyses don't lead anywhere useful — and what to do differently

• A four-step process for finding the messaging gap your bank can own

• The difference between digital whitespace and on-the-ground competition — and why both matter

• How AI fits into this process without replacing the thinking

• A simple test to know if your messaging is specific enough

Resources:

• Watch the competitive analysis demo in the AI webinar at bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

• The Bank Marketing Minute (Newsletter): www.bankmarketingminute.com

• Contact: contact@bankmarketingshow.com

You can't fake culture. You can put posters in the break room and bring in an ice cream
truck on Fridays, but your employees and your customers will know the difference. Real
culture is lived, not declared — and when it's real, it shows up in your marketing without
you having to force it.

Peter Ort is EVP and COO at MCS Bank in central Pennsylvania, where he oversees
operations, development, and marketing strategy. MCS Bank serves communities that
range from Penn State's tech-driven economy to rural Amish communities — and
Peter's approach to building a consistent culture across that spectrum is something any
bank can learn from.

In this episode, we cover:
• Why marketing isn't just external — and how celebrating your employees
internally creates the stories that power your external brand
• The courier who fixed a customer's gate, and why you can't buy that kind of
marketing
• How to find your real culture: honest assessment, anonymous surveys, and
getting out of the corner office
• Four elements of a thriving culture: voice, trust, communication, and shared
vision
• Why Peter hires on attitude over aptitude — and sits in on every interview,
including part-time summer hires
• The difference between telling your story and telling your customers' stories —
and how the best marketing is when your customers celebrate you

Lightning round:
• Personal best: Graduated with honors from the Pennsylvania Bankers
Association Advanced School of Banking
• Book: The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
• Best advice received: Never take criticism from someone you wouldn't take
advice from
• What he tells his team: "Are you ready for another day of banking excellence?"

Resources:
• Peter Ort: peter.ort@mcs.bank
• Peter on LinkedIn
• Book: The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

AI isn't going to replace your entire marketing team tomorrow. But it is going to change what you do, and how fast you're expected to do it. It's already reducing marketing hiring and eventually will impact team sizes. Banks and bank marketers that start learning these tools now, will get ahead of slower-moving competitors (both smaller AND larger ones) who are stuck in analysis paralysis about what to do. And, becoming the go-to AI person in your bank will help your career.

This is part two of our two-part series based on the AI webinar we recently gave with our partner, Kadince. Here, we dive into the topics in more depth that we were able to cover on the webinar. But the webinar's not a prerequisite!

In this episode, we cover:

• · What we think AI's impacts to bank marketing, and banking in general, will be over the next 12 months, next 3 years, and beyond
• · How banking itself may change as the technology advances
• · Five things you can do this week to start weaving AI tech into your day-to-day

Resources mentioned:

· Watch the full webinar at bankmarketingshow.com

· Email us at contact@bankmarketingshow.com for the full webinar deck

· Subscribe to our companion newsletter at bankmarketingminute.com

AI can write your tagline in 5 seconds. Should it?

Not in 5 seconds, because you'll sound like every other bank. AI gives you the average of the internet, and the average community bank's marketing is, well, average.

Dan and Chris break down what bank marketers should actually be doing with AI right now – how to add your human judgment, local feel and emotional nuance to AI tools, so you get great outputs instead of average ones.

This is part one of a two-part series based on the AI webinar we recently gave with our partner, Kadince. Here, we dive into the topics in more depth that we were able to cover on the webinar. But the webinar's not a prerequisite!

In this episode, we cover:

• · Why AI-generated content looks polished, but generic
• · The 80-20 rule for making AI output better
• · A 6-part prompting formula you can apply to any situation
• · Quick wins you can do this week

Resources mentioned:

· Watch the full webinar at bankmarketingshow.com

· Email us at contact@bankmarketingshow.com for the full webinar deck

· Subscribe to our companion newsletter at bankmarketingminute.com