Bank Marketing Wisdom Unveiled: A Candid Conversation with John Oxford

Oh, I'm glad to be here. This is kind of a homecoming, getting to talk to you. So this is great.

Well, I'll tell you what's good is talking to you today. And I know that sounds a little cliche, but here's why. In 2006, a young John Oxford who was in his 20s took a class at ABA Bank Marketing School with a guy named Jack Hubbard in 2006. And man, it was great. And I didn't know where my career would go, and you're one of those people that really had a part in deciding where my career went. And you're one of the best teachers at the school. I don't say that just because I'm on the show. I tell people that will ever listen, like listen to Jack Hubbard. He knows the fundamentals and the foundations. And we can talk digital and AI and chat and all that stuff, but if you don't have the foundation you teach, you can't go anywhere. And so the good is that you're here and we're talking, and it's kind of a real homecoming moment. I mean, 2006, 16, 17 years ago, I don't know, do the math. I was sitting in a classroom at Northwestern up in Chicago. And you taught me. And so now I'm CMO of a $17 billion company. At the time, I was just a little marketing assistant for a $2 billion bank. So you talk about a career trajectory, and now I'm talking to you. So if anything's good, it's that what you've given back to the banking community is sitting right in front of you today. So this is great.

I would probably add a chapter. So I talk about the four Cs in the book, which is content, connection, conversion, and campaigns. I would probably add another C of context. I think where we are in the world now, things get taken out of context. The cancellation of celebrities and marketing and mistakes people make. You can go back and look at case studies of Bud Light and Pepsi and Toyota and look at all these companies and what they've done and how they've pivoted. And so I would talk a little bit more about context and how the context matters, especially in the world of social media. I would probably add a little about AI and artificial intelligence. That wasn't really ChatGPT wasn't really a thing in 2019 yet. So I'd probably add something about usage of it and maybe the over-hypeness of it at this point. It may become something amazing that you have to have, but right now I don't think it's taking jobs from marketers, but you definitely need to understand it and keep an eye on it. At this point, it does help with some efficiencies. So I would probably add a chapter about that. But I think still the four Cs, I transition from the four Ps of marketing to the four Cs in the book, and I still think they're very relevant. It's easy to start a marketing campaign if you look at your content, how it connects, then how you convert it. Because as you know, being a salesperson, if you can't convert it, what's the point in doing all this stuff? You're not going to be around a long time if you can't convert your marketing. And then you bundle that in a campaign. So the four Cs still work, but I would probably add something about AI and something about context in the way things are delivered to your audience.

Oh, I was on spring break in 2017, 16 or something like that, and I was listening to Freakonomics Radio, which is one of my favorite podcasts, and I loved their stuff. And I was like, you know, maybe we could do something like this about bank marketing. And at the time, there were a couple out there. Now there's a hundred thousand podcasts you can get on marketing, whatever. There weren't as many then. There were still some. And anyway, Josh, one of my best friends as far as colleagues, and we're super close. So anyway, we talked and I said I think we can do this. And he has the staff, and he and I had the time to grab a couple coffees every couple weeks and put a couple episodes together. And we started. And honestly, I think it was just kind of the maybe embarrassing thought of what are my friends gonna think? Are they gonna think I'm an idiot hearing me talk just out loud, unfiltered? And we filtered a little bit. But anyway, all of a sudden I had friends that were like, man, I listen to it. When's the next one coming out? And then my mom listens to every one and gives me feedback. And all of a sudden I was like, okay, people really like it. And it kind of led to a couple speaking engagements and some other stuff. So the auxiliary stuff that happened around it was really cool. But yeah, so we started that a few years ago and we've gotten a few listens. I think we have 30 to 40,000 listens overall. It's about a couple thousand per episode. And because it's a pretty tailored podcast, it's not broad, and neither one of us are celebrities. So you know, you got to take down the, you hear these people get millions of listens. Well, there's reasons why. But ours, we've got a lot of CMOs and marketing directors, sales directors, revenue officers, those types that listen to it when we look at the data. So it's been a labor of love, but it's pretty fun to get out there and preach a little bit to the choir every once in a while.

I think time, talent, vulnerability. I think people are scared to get out there. A podcast is public speaking, and it is. And it's one of the, what is it? It's like death, taxes, public speaking, like things people hate. And so I think people are scared of it. I think they're too vulnerable. They're afraid, I'll say something, no one will like it, and then I'll make a UDAP expression or I'll do something out of compliance. So there's the fear and the risk. Time and talent. Most community bankers have about 18 different hats they have to wear. Some of them are HR, some of them are sales, compliance, they do treasury management, some of them are lenders and marketing. So the smaller the bank, the less time you have to divide up your day for a podcast. And then talent, I mean, it does take a little bit of talent to be able to talk on a podcast. Same way like you teaching a class, it takes talent to get up in front of a group and do it. I, in another life, taught at a couple universities and I still teach at a couple banking schools on the marketing front. And I tell a lot of classes when I teach public speaking, because that was one of the courses I taught, you can be the best engineer, you can be the best doctor, you can be the best whatever, but if you can't publicly speak, past that job interview or get in the door to communicate those tactical talents, they don't matter. And I think there's a lot of tactical talent gap in community banking with CMOs. I think they can turn in a report, they can look at a CRM, they can run a sales contest or whatever in their bank or campaign, but a lot of times being able to get up and be the one that does it themselves, it's tricky. I used to also work at the White House for a little bit in the speechwriting area, and they would often try to get the speechwriters to go give speeches. You know, here these guys that write for the president and the cabinet and the secretaries, but when do they actually go out and actually deliver speeches? And that was a challenge they had because a lot of them were really good writers, but put them in front of 500 people and they would melt. And so I think that's a big thing, is kind of like the podcast. Are you good at doing that and can you do it? I think that's where a lot of the fear and vulnerability comes in.

It was great. I was a junior staffer. I was right out of a campaign. It was 2001 to 2003. Biggest day was 9/11, obviously. I was in the White House. Interesting story. When the planes hit the Pentagon, and then the plane hit the Pentagon, the two planes hit the towers, we were in a meeting discussing the stem cell communication because President George Bush was going to make a decision on stem cells and how it would work as opposed to different medical conditions and how they could use it and draw the cells. And we were working on it, and all of a sudden the Secret Service came in. They swept the Secretary, who was Tommy Thompson, Health and Human Services. They swept a bunch of other people out, said go, go get them out. And they looked at me and said, do you have family? Are you married? I said no, no, because I was single out of school. And they said, you're staying behind. So I became the essential employee that ran the Department of Health and Human Services as a 24-year-old kid out of school. And so I sat there and took phone calls from CNBC and MSNBC and talked about what the response was going to be to cleaning up in New York. I knew nothing. I was just passing along messages that I was getting. And then I walked home that night down DC in the dark. There were no cabs, there was no trains running. Walked about a mile to my house, and it was just an eerie night. Weather was perfect. September, you remember everyone remembers that day. It was perfect weather. But yeah, I was labeled essential because I basically had no family or kids, so they said you can stay behind and work in the office. So it was a crazy day, crazy day.

Yeah, I've got a small mention in Karl Rove's book, the former adviser of the president. I drove him in the ice one time and our car spun around and we thought we were going to crash, so I almost ended the presidency. So you might have liked me if that happened because I was his driver for like a day or two when he needed someone to drive around before we had Secret Service. So I got lots of cool stories from that. It was another lifestyle, another lifetime. But I learned a lot about it. I learned a lot about people and kind of how our government works or doesn't work in some ways. So I take credit with the criticism of working for that president, and I kind of watch how the others work these days too. So it was a fun experience.

So full disclosure, that's probably one of the weakest things I do, honestly. We're really good at branding. We're really good at creative. I mean, I wore my jersey today for Renasant with our soccer team that we sponsor in Nashville. I typically try to wear it when I do marketing stuff because it's one of the biggest investments we've done as a marketing team, and it's fun, and I don't have to wear a tie or jacket when I wear it, so it's kind of fun. But to that point, it's probably one of the weakest things we do. Full vulnerable here. You know, we roll out a campaign with Kirk Herbstreit, our spokesperson, or a community development campaign or something we do in the market, and getting it to our not only front line but second line. Because the front line, your tellers, your CSRs, your front folks, but then the second line are those commercial lenders, those treasury management specialists, investment advisors, all that, mortgage originators, all that second tier that kind of the next level. A lot of times we kind of forget, hey, we need to tell them this is going on. We need to say, hey, when Kirk talks about rewards checking, he's talking about how you can get these benefits for doing the checking. And sometimes that's kind of where we rush it to the marketplace because we're so excited to get this new campaign out. We've got the creative and the social and the tactics and the communication, and it's web and digital and geo-fenced, and then it's got a call center ready for it because we've communicated with them that they may get calls. And then all of a sudden we kind of forget that when the customer calls their banker, they need to know too. And sometimes the banker's like, yeah, I saw it on LinkedIn or I saw it on social. But we try to put out an email about every other Friday. I call it the Four for Friday, and I put it out within our bank, and it has four points of what's going on this week in marketing or within two weeks. And I try to make it fun. It's very unfiltered. I type up a little story about something going on in the marketplace or in the world, almost SNL-like. Try not to get myself in trouble because this world today, you can with context, as I said. But yeah, that's huge, and I think it's a place where a lot of people miss, and that's where you'll see the disconnect between sales and marketing. When you have a branding campaign going, for instance, everyone wants funding right now, so we're trying to raise deposits. Deposits where your commercial lender is generally, you know, they're compensated off their loans, and so when they're out there, they've got to fund their loans. And so it helps them get it through credit, etc. And so if they're not hooked up to your deposit campaign, whether it be something as simple as CDs or something as robust as growing internal with a CRM and going into different personas of people to get them into the bank, or however you're scoring your customer, they need to know what the campaign's going to be because if they don't, it can be very odd when they talk to customers. Seen marketing yet the person in the bank hasn't. So yeah, I think that's probably what I would say is one of my weaknesses is really, it's not communication, it's the making sure they've gotten the message internally before it goes externally.

Yeah, so I don't want to necessarily mention something against your sponsors of your show, but just got to be full disclosure what we use. We're a Salesforce bank, so we use a lot of Salesforce. Then we have our own internal system we built called ShareWallet, and we've got some guys internally that run that, and it's our own, I guess it's proprietary, it's our own deal that we use. We merge those together. And then we also have our core with FIS, so we use some of their tools. So you've got your core, you've got Salesforce, you've got our own ShareWallet, and then we use like Pardot, and we use what used to be Social Studio, but now we've moved that to use some different social solutions with Ben Pannone and his group. So we've got a bunch of different groups out there and partners that we combine. Use all of them, but Salesforce is our key one with our ShareWallet internal system, and we combine those and we go to town, man. We look, pull your mortgage customers, see which ones don't have deposits. Pull your deposit customers, see which ones don't have savings accounts. And then just start marketing back and forth to those groups. Time together, and then put them in the automation loop, and they get an email every 14 to 21 days, and then we monitor that and you do your opt-outs. So anyway, any marketer worth their salt will know how to do these things. That's pretty fundamental now, but you have to have the money and the investment in the tech to do it.

So I always, my ratio is always a million dollars in marketing for every billion in assets. So I always say that. So whatever size you are, that's where I think your benchmark should be. A lot of banks won't give you that much money. Some will, but then they'll consider marketing investing in technology or something else, which really isn't marketing or sales. So let's ask for a million dollars for every billion in assets and then chop your pie up. And the second thing I think banks don't do well, or community banks, is measure your marketing dollars that are seen by the public. You can spend a lot on creative. You can have a $100,000 commercial, but if you only have $25,000 to put it in the marketplace, you've really skewed yourself. But also make sure you're investing in the creative because I don't want to see something made with an iPhone that gets on television because then it's running up against national companies, it makes you look cheap. So you've got to balance that. But you still want the majority of your dollars going to public eyes or public sales from marketing. So you can, you know, don't go spend a million dollars on Salesforce if that's going to rob your budget of any ability to deliver a message to the audience. So that's where I would say when you look at your budget, put that pie 70% of it going public-facing, 30% being your internal creative, your internal buying, your internal tactical vendors you want to use. If you're going to do Social Assurance to do your social, or if you're going to do whatever Marquee or whatever it is, make sure that the money you're spending on that is not detracting or taking away from the money that's going to be going to public-facing marketing campaigns.

So let me give you a disclaimer. I tend to call digital the fascinating distraction. I think it's fascinating. AI is fascinating. Digital is fascinating, but it's also a distraction from the fundamentals of how you convert a customer and how you grow your wallet, your share wallet, which is what you teach, is going down the line and really digging deep on what the customer needs and then adding to that share of wallet. But as far as digital goes, I think social media is way underutilized by banks. I think it's one of the most underutilized tactical things we have. It's not free, but it's a free channel. So TV is not a free channel. It costs. Direct mail is not a free channel. It costs money to get a stamp. It costs money to put a television ad on during the Super Bowl. It costs a lot of money. It doesn't cost any money to use Twitter or X as we call it now, or use Facebook, or use LinkedIn. And so I think the channel reduction allows you to spend more creative to try to get that virality or viral ad or viral whatever. SEC Shorts is one we use. Every Monday we do a video about what went on in SEC football during the weekend. We get 100 million views on that. We can't buy a television commercial other than the Super Bowl that would ever get that many views. And we don't buy a national ad because we're not a national bank. So it's important to realize that that channel is there. And as far as your second part, I think what social media, I love Facebook because it sells CDs. You can sell CDs really well on Facebook. I think it's good for community posting pictures of your bank out in the community doing good works. Twitter is good for information. It's more like a news station, so you can promote on that. LinkedIn is great for recruitment. I mean, recruiting people, finding people, getting premium and going in and looking at their resume. I mean, you don't have to make a resume anymore, just go to LinkedIn and look at it. So it's a great recruiting tool. I think it's a good sales tool for the right market. I don't think you're going to run a bunch of retail deposits off LinkedIn. You may differ, but I think you can do commercial. I think you can do some treasury sales. You got to know how to mine it properly, but I think it's good for a certain market with LinkedIn. And Instagram matches up with Facebook, just a little younger demo. So we're really on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and X. We don't really toy with many others unless you consider YouTube a social media channel. We love YouTube, but it's a little less social and a little more just content consuming. So that would be my five areas that I look at with social media.

Yeah, so I hate the answer it depends because there's no silver bullet to anything. But if it's a deposit campaign, it's obviously how much did you spend, what's the deposit valued, how many did you open, subtract the spend, and there you got your ROI on a deposit campaign. Gets a little trickier on events. Like if Kirk speaks at an event for us and we invite a hundred people, you know, you want to invite, we usually tell our bankers to invite two or three people, try to invite some current customers and some non-current customers. And then we get a guest list we can put in our ShareWallet system or our Salesforce. You can look at, you know, score how valuable they are to the bank with the products they have, try to add products, try to match them to people that don't have the product but look like them, twin them up. You know, this business has this product, this one doesn't, can we sell to them? Weirdly enough, our bank does factoring. And we also, if you have $2.5 million, we have a hedging area in the bank where we can help large businesses hedge their interest rates. So how do you sell? Well, you look for someone that has over $2.5 million with your bank and you look at that customer and try to introduce them to that line of business. So I think the ROI is different for everything you do, but you need to have it. I would say television is the hardest ROI we have for banks because we don't have restaurants where people can go two to three times a day. We don't sell shoes. So we don't put a Nike ad up and then watch us sell LeBron shoes and count the number of shoes over the ad and figure out the ROI. It's really hard to do that with bank marketing because we don't have inventory. Our inventory is people and interest rates. So it's a hard ROI on TV. But with social, you put a campaign out there, add up the products that come through it and try to measure it. ROI is really hard for marketing, and Tom's good at talking about that. He has a great radio voice, by the way. Tom has a good voice. It's kind of soothing. You're sitting in the class, if you have the afternoon classes, might go to sleep after lunch because he's a soothing speaker. That's not a knock at his ability to deliver. He's a good speaker. But yeah, he does teach well in ROI. But I think you know, it just depends. If you gave me a specific thing to ROI, I can usually figure it out. TV's hard. Things like branding over social media is hard. Every few years maybe do a branding survey, find out your aided awareness, unaided awareness, or no awareness, the three awarenesses. If you're aided, someone tells you the name, they say yeah I've heard of it. If they're unaided, they tell you they've heard of it without you asking. And no awareness means they've never heard of you. So you want to be in that aided awareness category versus non-awareness. That's where branding comes in. So there's ways to measure it, but otherwise hard for marketers in banking because there's not a physical inventory product.

A few things. I think one is ask to be on ALCO. Ask to be on the ALCO committee because you can listen. And I wouldn't hop in there and start giving a bunch of opinions because at the time, you're the marketer. They think of you as, you know, marketing is really taking art and creating commerce out of it. That's what marketing is, is taking art and making commerce with it through content. But get on ALCO, learn how the bank makes money. Understand non-interest income, interest income, and securities at a high level so you know how the bank makes money. And then start making impact with your marketing campaigns, campaigns that show that you're being of value to the bank and the ALCO committee. So I think that's one. Secondly, get to know your CEO really well and start doing extra things for he or she. Speechwriting, give them information before a meeting that they might not get from somebody else. Don't be afraid to raise your hand in meetings. Know what you're gonna say. Don't just raise it, but I mean know what you're gonna say so you're obviously providing some value. So I think those three things will get you going pretty well. Get to know your board. A lot of these banks have boards. Get to know your board really well and help them. I can't tell how many times I've done a marketing project for a board member that has nothing to do with the bank. They want to help on some with their business. So do that. Get to know your board really well. And then a lot of it with community banking is just longevity. You have to outlast some people. I hate to say that, but community banks a lot of times are very family-oriented. And so you've got to get in with the family or the ownership of the bank really well. If they're publicly traded in a smaller bank, again, get to know your board. Work there for a while. You don't move to the C-suite day one unless you're moving from a bank to a C-suite. So it takes a little patience and a little time of really proving your value and your worth.

X for me would be this. This is going to sound pretty cheesy, but don't forget the fundamentals. I'm telling you, we're getting into this fascinating distraction world where everyone's AI, chatbot, artificial intelligence, what are you doing? And then you forget your customer just wants to cash a check on Friday afternoon. And you're over here worried about all this other stuff, and your bank doesn't have mobile deposit yet. Or the customer is in line and someone's talking to them about adding a product. And we forget as marketers because we're out here worried about what way we can artificially write content for a content article to create an SEO post that drives people to our website to get them on to this. And all of a sudden you're forgetting that that customer just wants the cup of coffee and the quick conversation and to cash a check or to open a bank account for their kid going to college in the fall. And we forget the fundamentals of the human experience and the connection, like you said earlier, of the marketing campaign combining with the sales to know what we're delivering at the right time at the right moment for that customer. So if I'm looking at a crystal ball, I'm saying don't forget the fundamentals of the customer. Don't forget the fundamentals of the customer because I think we're getting way too distracted and fascinated with things that the customer honestly doesn't care about. So let's stick to fundamentals in 2024.

So I follow Skeletor. He's evil. I'm evil, diabolical. So I try to think of what would Skeletor do every time I make a decision. No, I'm just kidding. But I do love some old He-Man cartoons from when I was a kid. I like Tom Goodwin on LinkedIn. I think he's kind of a contrarian, so I like his voice. I like Gary Vaynerchuk. I know some people have some opinions on him. He's kind of hot and cold on stuff, but whatever. I like different opinions. So like Gary, I like Tom. I like Brent Gleeson. He's a former Navy SEAL and he writes about going to battle. He has a book called Taking Point, which is about leadership. So I like him. Trying to think of some others. I'm a big Freakonomics guy. I love Dubner and Levitt and all that type of stuff. I love the kind of socioeconomic books. So I'm into a bunch of those. And Digital Darwinism was Tom Goodwin's book about the digitalization of the world. And it's repetitive, but it's a good book from the Ubers and the usage of apps and planes and tickets to concerts and how that impacts the world we live in. And so I love kind of socioeconomic books. I'm not a big non-fiction guy. I love movies, but I don't read a lot of non-fiction. I read a lot of practical solution books and army military stuff in that area. So that's where my interests lie. Probably need to get a little bit weird. I consider myself a creative, but I'm not really into science fiction. But all the people I work with are a lot of nerds, so it's kind of cool. I think I bring a lot of levity to our conversations with the Star Wars and Star Trekkies that I work with.

Sure. So the podcast is the Marketing Money Podcast at marketingmoneypodcast.com. It's on iTunes, it's on any of the little podcast apps. Whatever you use, there's a hundred of them that you get a podcast. But it's pretty much easy to find. Just Google or type in your browser marketingmoneypodcast.com and it's there. Usually do one every couple weeks. Just timing wise, it's hard to get one in, but yeah, every couple weeks we release that. The book's on Amazon. If you just type in No More Next Time John Oxford, let me see, get it on the screen. There you go. No More Next Time John Oxford. You get that on the screen. Get it. It's $19, but it's like a dollar on the audio, not the audio, but the e-version is like a dollar. So it's pretty easy to get. And if you want to get me, just go on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. But if you Google me, I'm on every press release from Renasant because I'm the CMO because we're publicly traded. I do a lot of our investor relations work as well as our political work too. So I don't just do marketing. So you may see me out there in some other areas. But yeah, I'm easy to find. I'm easy to find because I'm on all the bank's comms and I'm on LinkedIn. It's a really easy way to find me. So yeah, I'm easy to get. I don't hide in the cave.

Absolutely. Appreciate you having me on, Jack. And Merry Christmas to you.