Community Heroes Connect - John Oxford

I'm here to see you, man. Nebraska's finest in Tupelo, Mississippi, with Elvis Presley's birthplace. We are sitting about 10 feet from where Elvis was born right now. That is pretty amazing to think about. In this last year, who would have thought that at the end of it I would be here in Tupelo, Mississippi, covering all things banking that we've missed out in the last year? So, I want to back up. We've known each other for five plus years, hanging around at bank conferences, understanding marketing and all these things together. But what have you been doing this last year? It hasn't been as fun as usual when I see you and we're at some concert or happy hour in some cool town, like Austin, Nashville, Baltimore, Denver. So, a lot of remote work, not a lot of travel. The family and I ran down to the beach maybe one time, but it's been a lot of the same. When I got your text you were in town, I was like, man, something different. But yeah, it's been fine. Everyone's healthy. The bank's held up well. I think our marketing team's done well. A lot of remote working too. You stopped by, I showed you the office. There's one person in there. It's a little bit of a ghost town, but everybody's there anyway.

This is my 16th year, if you can believe. I know I look super young, so no one would think I could have had a professional job for that long. But yeah, 16 years. It's been good. The bank's been doing well in Tupelo. We're in six or seven states now. We've moved into the Carolinas with some small shops. 15 billion dollars. I think we're like the 98th largest bank in the country. It's a good place to be. PPP tested us, but we took care of our customers and some new ones. So I'm kind of ready to move forward into the old normal.

I did. Scary. Was this something you had been thinking about for a long time? Walk me through that process.

I was going to do a coloring book, but then I could never stay in the lines anyway, so I thought I'd try to write a real book. Sports went down. I'm a huge sports fan. I've got the jersey on today from our MLS team. But to the point, there wasn't a lot going on in the spring of 2020, so I'm sitting around, what am I going to do? So I started working on a book, an outline for it. For those that don't write books, there's two or three ways you can write a book. There's the old-timey way where you actually type it. There's another where you kind of dictate the book, you talk it out, you record it, and then you send it off to a company to send you back the transcript written out, and then you edit it that way. So you're still writing, you're just not writing every single word, but you edit it and rework it that way, then get it to a publisher and send it out. I self-published because you couldn't travel to sell it to anybody, and if I was going to do it online, I don't know if it would have worked. Anyway, I wanted to get it to market fast and I wanted to keep all the money for myself versus taking some money from somewhere else. I didn't do it to become the best marketing book ever. I did it basically as a labor of love and to help people out that I thought could glean some value from it.

Good comparison. Elvis. I mean, it's basically the same thing. I'm basically Elvis. But sometimes we're writing ourselves out of our issues. Sometimes we're thinking, hey, I've got all these things going on, and maybe if I write it, it helps me more than it does even the reader. But I have read your book. Really good.

I did it. I think it used to be the four Ps, and I think those are kind of dead. Now it's all about what content you can build. Especially during the pandemic, it's got to be content-based because you can't have events. The relationship stuff is really hard to do right now. So it's content, how does it connect? That's not plugging what your company does. You're built around social media, and that to me is the modern channel of delivering content. So it's about the content, it's about the connection, and then the connection moves to a conversion, and then finally a campaign that encompasses it all. Because if you can't connect and convert, why are you doing it? Elvis wrote a great song. What if no one heard it? It wouldn't make any difference. That builds his audience, then he converts them into purchasing his music, and he gets wealthy and he moves to Memphis. But the point is, the same thing with the book. When we as bank marketers create content, we have to deliver it over social media, find our audience, our target, then it has to convert. And then I wrap it in a campaign. Everything needs a campaign with these Cs built into it. I just felt like it was something I could share with the world. Somebody might take a little nugget out of it. Somebody might read it and be like, whatever. But I didn't do it for my livelihood. I have a great career with Renasant. It's just a little side hustle, and it's led to a little extra college funding for my kids. So it's been good.

That's correct. Kind of an accidental marketer from that.

When I was 17 years old, Nabisco came to our school and interviewed students for like five spots on some type of focus group thing. They said if you do well at it, there's potential opportunity for more. So I guess I was opinionated. I didn't have braces, I remember that was one thing. I was opinionated, and they did like a little taste test. Actually, weirdly, my wife would say this, I have a really strong sense of smell. So it all worked well for the job. So I interviewed, they hired me. I did like four or five focus groups, and they got to this next level where they would bring commercials out and you'd watch them, you'd rate them on a clipboard how you thought the commercial would convince you to match the product. So there wasn't any confusion. Then they'd take your notes. It was funny too because they would pay you in cash, and because you could only work for two hours at a time because you can only taste so much food, it was really high paid. It was like $75 an hour for two hours. At 17, I'm wealthy. All my buddies would mow lawns all week during the summer and work on the weekends, and I could just go work for like two hours a week and make almost as much as them, and just hang out and do whatever I wanted to do. It was air-conditioned inside, got the nice foods, and then rate them by commercial or the jingle or the radio spot. I would look at the campaign, I would rate them. So at 17, I guess I accidentally stumbled into becoming a marketer, because I still vividly remember the process. It's what we do today. You look at a checking product. Is it compliant? Is it truthful? Does it do what it says? What's your audience? How do you communicate it? What channels do you use? Then how do you tweak it and test it?

I grew up in an entrepreneurship household, and I remember a lot of those conversations young. My dad was head of corporate comms for Lowe's, the hardware franchise. So we grew up in the corporate headquarters, which at the time was in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. It's moved to around Charlotte now, but it was in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. For years, he did all their annual reports, other investor relations, he did part of their campaigns, and he had marketing as part of his job. Oddly enough, as a kid, if my mom couldn't go, because I was the oldest child, a lot of times I would go on trips with him. He took me to Hong Kong and China with him when they were doing purchasing deals. I went to New York with him twice. So I kind of got like a free internship, but I was just a kid. I would listen and hear, and through osmosis, I kind of picked up on how it worked for the do-it-yourself hardware company. They went public with their stock, and so I was there for a lot of that stuff. As it got bigger and that company grew from just a little small town hardware store to being a major, major company, hitting Home Depot, Lowe's and Depot are like the Coke and Pepsi of hardware. As it grew up, I got to watch my dad grow with the company. I remember sitting there watching he and some of his friends write the annual report, then meet on the weekends and go through the pictures and pick the pictures for it. I watched all that. So I guess people kind of do as their parents do at some point, or they learn from them. I picked up on it, not on purpose, but it just kind of rolled with where my senses went.

We were 2.3 billion when I started, and we're 15 billion today. Pretty good growth over 15 years.

Right, exactly.

I should pull up the Airtable calendar and just let you go. Oh my god, look at the stuff you didn't get to do. That's the cool part is we've kind of got a plan to rehash. But the biggest thing was the jersey. I'm wearing it obviously, and you laugh about it, but we had just gotten a huge MLS deal. First game, 60,000 people, largest soccer game in the history of the state of Tennessee. Huge deal. We signed Kirk Herbstreit as a brand spokesperson. We'd just done Rise with Renasant, a women's empowerment deal. We had a conference we were doing for Rise with Renasant. We signed two golfers on LPGA and PGA Tour. And it wasn't just all sports. We did the Southern Podcast now, which is two ladies that talk about women's entrepreneurship, travel around the South and do culture stuff in the South. We had done SEC Shorts, which was the football show. So a lot of content built up there. It was more than just the branches open or closed, or look at the new hire downtown, or look at our new branch opening. It was a lot of really good engaging content. I took this from David Beebe, the former head of marketing for Marriott, who used to say, 'Why be the commercial when you can be the show?' So we want to be the show in our content. We drive it through social media, which is one of our key channels. I still think social media is underrated as a marketing channel, at least by banks. I think we're in 2010 where people in 2010 were, compared to bigger brands and bigger companies like what Wendy's does, car dealerships and sports teams do. We're still in the infancy of using social media. I'm afraid when we get good at it in the next 20 years, it's going to be something else the banks will have to pivot again. But by then, you'll have sold your company and become a wealthy entrepreneur, and I'll be retired, and we'll be traveling somewhere.

Well, not only that, our team was one of the two that tested positive for the most COVID cases and didn't get to go to the MLS's Back Cup. So when it came back, we didn't even get to come back. We had to wait an extra two months to get back into MLS. And then we did, we finished the season with 17 or 18 games with very light crowds, five percent allowed. So a major investment by our company and a major investment with him and us, being their official bank, there's a lot of relationship to that, and it just crushed us not to do it. Not crush us financially, we did great. But my point is, we built so much content around this. Kirk Herbstreit fans, jerseys, debit cards, the whole deal. And that was probably a third of what we were going to do in 2022 as a big project. But what I was most proud of is we did a project, unknowing that the pandemic was going to hit, called Meet the Bankers. What we did is we went around to every market and we interviewed five or six bankers in each market. We ended up doing 70 different bankers. We did a blog off of it, a podcast off of it, video clip interviews, drop quotes on social media. So we gave each one of them about 20 pieces of content, some of them up to five minutes, some just a little quote. And we just owned social media space for probably from about April of 2020 to about August. We ran that campaign. So we were still in front of our customers even when we couldn't be in front of our customers. It was complete luck. We were just building this campaign, we'd done all this content, we'd had it kind of built up ready to go, and then COVID hit. I was like, what are we going to do, guys? We've got this campaign sitting here that's our bankers. Let's do it. So we did really well. We got thousands and thousands of impressions and views, and our bankers got business off of it. It was like, if I can't go to my customer, I'll just send them a video of what I'm talking about, share my expertise. So Meet the Bankers was our punt that ended up being a good punt during the pandemic.

It's not text message marketing. It's the old joke, marketers ruin everything. I love LinkedIn, and now one in every 100 messages is of legitimacy or something that I actually need. It's a form of social media. I still think Twitter is underused as an informational channel because it's like news. That's where we get our news now. Facebook is where they go to weirdly to purchase stuff and check on their family. I think you can sell over Facebook better than banks ever had. Twitter's news information. LinkedIn is just a job search engine now to me. I post on it, I like it for content. I think you can glean a lot of information from it. I don't think it's a sales platform as much for bankers. It might be for others selling to banks. And then the newer stuff, I think Instagram is great. I think showing a vision that's really easy to get, because with compliance and banks, we always make things too complicated. Instagram's not complicated. It's a picture, you can get it. And then TikTok, we mentioned that earlier. Clubhouse, I don't know about that yet. I feel like I'm just getting on a conference call I wasn't invited to. It's like sneaking into it. You hop on and they're like, John Oxford. I'm like, no, no, no, I don't want to talk. I just want to listen and be quiet. They're going to ask if you can see your screen or something. It's weird. But as far as what people are on, they're on their phone eight hours a day now, surfing the web and surfing social media. So I think banks need to be proactive and get on there.

That's right, absolutely.

Absolutely. No one owns originality. Make sure you clear it with your lawyers and compliance so nobody gets sued here. But he took a lot of ideas from other people. He took a lot of his songs from the Black community. Shake Rag here in Tupelo, he got to hear the gospel songs, and he took that and then melded it into his own marketable way to sell that. And then the gyrating hips and all the stuff he stole. He goes up the line. Tina Turner, the Rolling Stones stole all their stuff from her, their dance moves. Mick Jagger would watch her when she opened for him, he stole their moves. So everyone steals from everybody and makes it better. We didn't invent mobile banking, but we try to make it better. Same thing. You're going to make social media, but you make it better for banks. So it's kind of the same thing. When it comes to marketing, how can you exploit what you've made better? Make it better with content, and then how do you find your audience and deliver it? Elvis was a master marketer, and the Colonel, his manager, from the rhinestones to him going to the army to doing movies, he was kind of what you see now, how stars get into different lines of entertainment. Rappers are then in movies, or maybe you guys want to sing and be in bands. Everyone wants to do the different thing, and he was the first one to do that. He did it all.

I appreciate it. I'm just glad you came down to make sure I'm still alive and doing okay.

Trying to keep the girlish figure, stay in shape.