Category Archives: Commercial Banking

The Mobile Marketing Opportunity of Behavioral Routines

An article recently posted on the Mobile Marketer web site urges marketers to think longer term about what they can and should be doing to nurture a relationship with someone who clicks on their ad from a mobile device. While I certainly agree with all of the advice (and assertions of missed opportunity) in the article, I think that this doesn’t push far enough. There’s something more that should added to marketers’ thinking about interactions with customers and prospects on their mobile devices: routine behaviors.

Some time ago, I signed up to receive Groupon daily offers and, as a result, wake up every day to find my Groupon email waiting for me in my inbox. And every day, I read the email. I’ve probably bought 2 or 3 things in the 18 months I’ve been subscribed, but that lack of conversion hasn’t stopped me from checking that email every day. The reason? It’s part of my daily routine. Wake up, make breakfast, check email—including that day’s email from Groupon. The combination of the variety of the offers, the programmed consistency of delivery, and the fact that I always have my mobile device on hand has ingrained checking that email into my morning behavior.

While it may not be the case that every marketer pursuing every type of customer should think in terms of establishing a presence in the audience’s daily routine, the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices makes it an opportunity every marketer should be considering. To aid in this consideration, below are some scenarios that would make “behavior integration” a strategy worth pursuing:

  • A highly competitive battle for mind share and audience attention
  • A need to expand the target audience’s understanding of the range of product, services, or solutions offered
  • Under-utilization of a rich collection of thought leadership resources

In any of these scenarios—or, most of all, in environments in which more than one of these scenarios are combined—a strategy to foster a behavioral routine that leverages the particular usage profile of mobile devices is worth exploring.

Bank C&I lending advances, small business lending lags

The NFIB recently published first-quarter 2012 data on U.S. commercial banks, which shows strong growth in commercial and industrial (C&I) lending, but continued decline in small business loan portfolios.

Overall, C&I loan portfolios at the end of 1Q 2012 were up 15% year-over-year (y/y).  The growth was driven by the larger banks; banks with more than $1 billion in assets grew C&I loan portfolios rose 20%, while banks with less than $1 billion in assets increased C&I loans by just 2%.  Most of the leading U.S. banks reported C&I loan growth rates of 20%+.  American Express grew C&I loans 13%, indicating that its spend-centric approach is beginning to stimulate growth in business card outstandings.  C&I growth was 2% between 4Q11 and 1Q12.

Small business loan portfolios (defined as C&I loans of less than $1 million) continued to decline, falling 1.6% y/y.  However, banks with more than $10 billion in assets grew small business loans by 4.6%, indicating that these banks have increased their share of small business loans.  However, the smaller community banks (with less than $100 million in assets) were the only bank-asset category to grow small business loans between end-4Q11 and end-1Q12.

Our analysis also looked at loan intensity–C&I and small business loans’ share of overall bank loan portfolios.  As expected, the larger banks have a higher C&I loan intensity, with this ratio declining steadily for smaller bank-asset categories.

For small business loan intensity, we see the opposite trend.  Smaller banks tend to have highest ratio of small business loans to total net loans, underscoring the importance of small business relationships to community banks.

The Vinaigrette Moment: Marketing and Sales Integration

Drip olive oil and vinegar onto a plate, and you end with little pools of each, unmixed, only really able to be enjoyed with some effort by manipulating your fork to get just the right amount of each to adhere onto the lettuce. However, if combine olive oil and vinegar in a receptacle and whisk them, you end up with a lovely blended vinaigrette. This description of basic salad dressing chemistry is a useful metaphor for bridging the divide between marketing and sales – a topic that was the subject of a panel in which I participated at the recent Tech Marketing Summit in Santa Clara.

Fundamentally, there is a lot about marketing and sales that is different:

  • Marketing tends to be more project (campaign) oriented while sales is more process (ongoing, repeated effort) oriented.
  • Testing and educational failure is (or should be) valued by marketing but is not really part of the sales lexicon.
  • And, most obviously, sales has revenue targets while marketing typically does not.

Oil and vinegar. But, with a little effort in the form of enabling technologies like integrated CRM/Marketing Automation systems, and some shared and defined objectives, the two can work separately but harmoniously to achieve good results.

Where things get really interesting, though, is when the two set aside their natural differences and really cooperate and collaborate. For example, if marketing interviews salespeople and finds that 15-20% of their time is spent creating presentations and doing customer research, there is a huge opportunity to give those sales people another 7-10 hours of sales time every week by creating presentation templates and a customer intel portal.  Likewise, if marketing and sales work together to analyze win/loss rates in certain segments, a picture can emerge of latent opportunities to pursue new markets or better allocate marketing investment to maximize the revenue opportunity. It’s only with this kind of collaboration that you get true go-to-market optimization.  And that’s the vinaigrette moment that produces real results.