Live from the Financial Brand Forum: Marketing that Moves the Balance Sheet with Dan Marks

speaker-1
Well, hey, everybody, and welcome back to the Community Bank Podcast. This is the podcast by bankers for bankers. I’m Caleb Stevens with South State Bank’s Capital Markets Division. And today on the show, we’re going to do something a little bit different. We’re going to play for you our first ever podcast recorded live from a conference. So last month in April, I attended the Financial Brand Forum in Las Vegas. And I sat down with Dan Marks, is the president of OptimaFi. They are a bank marketing company. We talked about all things bank marketing and

shared a little bit about what he does. We talked about what we do here at South State. And so I hope you enjoy this conversation about what bank marketers need to be focused on today. Before we get there, I want to tell you quickly again about the Elevate Banking Forum. It’s going down this September in Isle of Palm, South Carolina. We’re bringing the best bankers together for a two and a half day forum to give you the strategies that you need to know to grow your bank into 2027, which is crazy to say.

But man, how time flies. So join us this September. in the Charleston area, Isle of Palm, South Carolina at Wild Dunes Resort in late September for the Elevate Banking Forum. Click on the link in the show notes to get all the details, to view our agenda. We’ve got another great lineup of speakers this year. You’re not going to want to miss it. Click the link in the show notes to get more details. And we hope to see you there this September. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dan Marks.

speaker-1
Well, Dan Marks, welcome to the Community Bank Podcast live from the Financial Brand Forum. It’s great to see you. How are you?

speaker-0
Hey Caleb, awesome to be here.

speaker-1
So we’re here live on the patio of the financial brand. I don’t think we’ve ever done a live from an event podcast before, so we’re just gonna see how this goes. You can probably hear some pop music in the background. Maybe people walking by or outside, so if there’s wind, I apologize to our listeners. But that’s what this is all about, is serving the community banks, and we thought it’d be fun to talk to you for a minute. So yeah, thanks for stopping by.

speaker-0
for sure and I love being part of a marketing experiment. Good old test and learn.

speaker-1
Exactly, that’s the world that you live in, which is a great segue into the first thing I wanted to ask you is tell me about yourself, OptimaFi, and what you guys do to serve banks.

speaker-0
Sure, yeah. So I’m a long-time banker. Post-grad school, I joined what is now First Horizon. It was First Tennessee Bank at the time. I spent a number of years there on different roles. And at the end, I was the chief marketing officer for five years.

While I was at First Tennessee, my paths crossed with Tim Keith, who was our founder. He was the deposit product manager for a while.

We stayed in touch over the years. did a brief tour in Big Box Retail, then I was a CMO at first at what is now Hancock Whitney. I joined, was the Hancock Bank after they had bought Whitney Bank, but before it rebranded. So we did that rebrand work. then Tim called up one day and I had an opportunity to join what was Infusion Marketing Group at the time. And so we had…

And so it’s been really fun to help community banks grow by taking some of the capabilities, data, and just strategic thought process and resources that you have at a larger bank. And the original idea was you infuse that into community banks, thus the name Infusion, and give them some of those leverage capabilities to take data and to be very structured in the way they communicate with clients.

for a particular goal. if they’re trying to increase deposits or loans or fee income or checking accounts. And so that’s really, that’s our bread and butter. OptimaFI was the new name of Infusion Marketing Group. It happened after some acquisition that expanded our capabilities. But over the last just six years or so, we’ve generated

speaker-0
$30 billion of results for community banks in doing that discipline of helping community banks use data to grow.

speaker-1
Tell me about some of the lessons you learned as a bank CMO. You were with First Tennessee, which saw a lot of growth when you were there. guess they’re called First Horizon now. You were at Hancock-Whitney as a bank CMO. Tell me about some of the lessons you learned. And I guess it’s cool to talk to somebody who’s, you you’re on the agency side, but you’ve been in the shoes of the folks that you work with. So you can kind of speak their language and you know where they’re coming from and what they deal with. any lessons you learned and key takeaways from your time there?

speaker-0
Yeah, so one of the things I love about banking, and maybe this makes me a banking nerd, but banking, particularly community banking or community-focused banking is all about helping institutions and communities thrive. And so that purpose, that sense of purpose was one of things I learned, and particularly the contrast of being in banking, being briefly out of banking and get back, is that, I mean…

For all the knocks that banks get in some of the press, and certainly in periods of stress, that amps up. But banks perform a vital role, and that is very inspiring. So having a sense of mission and having that sense of purpose was one of the lessons I learned. Another lesson learned was the value of relationships. And that seems trite. I certainly, you there’s a lot

speaker-1
Bank doesn’t say we’re… I’ve never been said, we’re not about relationships. We’re just about transactions. They don’t really care about people.

speaker-0
Absolutely, right? And so, yeah. And so actually, was a point in time in my career where I kind of laughed at it because of that. Okay, everybody says it. And there’s an element there. So you have to be more than relationships, but you can’t be less. And to me, relationships means really genuinely caring about your counterparty. So whether that’s a,

a personal relationship, certainly a marriage is essential, but in a business context, if I genuinely care about my counterparty, if I want to my client be successful, or if I want to have a win-win relationship with a vendor or a community partner, whatever, so it starts with caring, but then also, you just talked about transactions, having a sense of I want to have a long-term prog-

mutually productive arrangement, right? And so to do that, you’ve got to add value, but you also, you’ve got to add value, you’ve got to care, but on the flip side, you’ve got to make sure that the counterparties you engage with also have that same idea. And co-workers, and so even in the co-worker world, I mean, I think I was blessed to be named CMO at First Tennessee at a relatively young age. And I think a lot of that speaks to,

what I learned and had some mentors teach me about relationships. You build relationships, you help your coworkers. If you want to make sure that your coworkers are successful in ultimately serving the needs. so that’s the second thing I learned is relationships. And the third is data. this may be a double nerd, but there’s a lot of opinions out there and opinions are great. Inspiration is a qualitative, nonlinear process.

But having data to say, I’m gonna try things, and then first of all, just having data to make sure that what I’m doing is aligned with something that matters for the business. But then having a plan to say, I wanna be able to quantify the impact of my creativity. And so, I think if I were sort of sum it up, is my time at banking is kind of whole brain.

speaker-0
the right brain creativity, the left brain analytics and making the power of having those work together.

speaker-1
So that’s a good segue time about data One of the things that I tell bank marketers when I meet with them is I say get to know your CFO Well and build a relationship with that person and get on the same page and have clarity around What are the key metrics that we need to measure so that we can show that our marketing? Investments are paying off in the long run and you may not see the tricky thing with marketing is money you invest in quarter one may not show up as revenue to a quarter four or quarter one of the next year

but it’s important to have an open dialogue with your CFO so you’re on the same page. Even here at the correspondent division, I was talking to our CFO the other day, I said, hey, I’d love to get some time with you to talk about how we’re investing our marketing dollars this year so that he knows and when he sees my expense report, he’s not like, whoa, what are we doing? I said, well, we were on, there’s a reason why we’re investing the dollars the way we are and there’s a very clear process for what we’re gonna track to know if it’s working.

or not, and that kind of eliminates the, well, should we really be spending money this way? Why don’t we cut here? And I always joke, if you alphabetize your expenses, what comes up first? A, advertising. Cut. Very easy thing to cut. So talk about your data approach so that a bank can feel good about its return on marketing investment.

speaker-0
Yeah, we could do probably four episodes on this topic alone. And I facilitated a panel, someone on this topic earlier today with some really smart bankers. In banking, it has to be about what the CFO cares about. So the CFO doesn’t really care about impressions or clicks. Now I think smart CFOs will want to understand, okay, what are the drivers?

that impact the balance sheet. so marketers understand that you’ve got to create awareness that’s engaging to have any chance of moving the balance sheet. But what the CFO really cares about is what’s the balance impact and what’s the NIM and fee income impact. So for bankers, particularly for bank marketers, they’ve got to understand that basic equation. And do they have to be accounting experts? No. But they have to have a…

a accounting 101 type understanding of the way that a bank makes money and that’s through balance sheet growth at an appropriate cost that allows them to earn a spread. That’s the way it works. so framing the marketing budget and plan and tracking, the closer you can get to explaining what you’re doing has an impact on the balance sheet.

That’s the CFO’s love language. For sure. Right? And so that’s, so that’s, I think that’s one of the that’s, fun about my banking career is we, were, it was a period of time where we were able to connect a lot of those outcomes. And is it perfect? No. Is there always a better way to do it? Yes. Can you argue attribution methodologies to your blue in the face? If you want to, yes, just like you can.

debate how many angels fit on the head of a pin, can argue and debate marking attribution forever. But there are ways, if you make reasonable assumptions, to say these set of activities have this impact on the

speaker-1
pieced together relatively.

helpful picture and there’s a saying, all models are broken but some are useful. In general, you can get a good sense of what’s working and what’s opening up opportunities for your bank from a deposit standpoint. You and I have talked about in the past, a lot of marketing teams and lending teams never talk to each other. Well, what happens when you got a marketing team that doesn’t know anything about commercial lending and you have a group of commercial lenders that don’t know anything about marketing? There’s a lot of missed opportunities.

there to, you know, when you’re on the same page and marketing and lending are working together towards a common set of goals, that can be really powerful. And then when you can show the CFO, hey, we’re targeting a specific set of accounts, whether it’s for deposit balances or for lending opportunities. You know, I think a lot of times as bank marketers, we just sort of limit our thinking about marketing to retail stuff. The sponsorship for the local parade, the billboard, the radio ad, a lot of kind of B2C general stuff.

We don’t always talk about how can your marketing team and your lending team work together. We actually, we did a whole podcast on this a couple months ago, so go check that out if you want a deeper dive on our opinion there. But any thoughts on that, Dan, is like, how can lenders and marketers work together so that there’s common, you know, focus?

speaker-0
Well yeah, and it starts with just that sense of I’ve got to be working towards a common goal. Right. Right. Like that’s sort of a basic, and then spending time.

speaker-1
And as a marketer, you’re not just there to make PDF flyers that your lenders say, hey, can you make that PDF flyer? You want to have a seat at the table where you can go to the lenders and say, here’s some ideas for you. Have you thought about this? There’s a level of proactiveness that this probably requires.

speaker-0
Yeah, so I worked with a fantastic commercial bank leader, actually at two different banks I worked at, Chip Knight, and his phrase was, no like trust. I totally stole that from Chip, but it’s so true. So spending time upfront to no like trust, that goes back to relationships. But once you’ve established that, and the benefit of some tools, so tools make this better, it doesn’t change the fundamentals, but…

thinking through, okay, here’s my list of people that I’m going after. And in commercial making, that’s a shorter list, bigger fish, shorter list. But fundamentally, it’s a list of people that I’m going after. What are the series of messages that I think are gonna be important in getting somebody to pay attention to me and float on the funnel? By the funnel, I mean, they’ve gotta become aware of you. That’s the no.

And so this no-like trust works externally as well as within teams, but you gotta, they gotta become aware of you. They’ve gotta become interested in what you’re saying, and then ultimately they gotta buy. And the buy is a trailing signal, but that’s where, so in commercial banking, we know that’s more steps, right? And so events are really powerful, feed that plan, right? That’s a great way to engage people. spending some time and kinda mapping out, all right, what does the…

awareness, engagement, purchase. What’s that journey?

speaker-1
customer takes to becoming a client.

speaker-0
That’s right. then stacking up assets against those. there’s multiple steps in commercial banking. one of the benefits of consumer and retail. that’s, so some of OptimaFI’s bread and butter is helping organizations more on the consumer and small business. But because there’s such good first party data, we can be very precise in identifying a list of people or businesses that have the capacity and propensity.

for a particular set of products and services, and then go after them across multiple channels, and multiple channels matters because nobody pays attention to one thing, and then track what was that impact on purchase. And so that same approach, or same methodology can work in consumer, small business, commercial. The specifics of that approach vary naturally depending on the audience.

speaker-1
So you did a breakout session I think earlier this morning here at the Financial Brand Conference and I guess just give us a few highlights and give us kind of a flavor for some of the things you talked about. I assume it’s some of the things we’re talking about right now but anything else that we haven’t discussed that you talked about with the bankers this morning?

speaker-0
Yeah, well, I think one of the things that, and this is a common…

So what’s not new under the sun in banking is the way banks make money. And so being grounded in that, and that was one of the things that we heard from each one of the panelists was, hey, I’ve got balance sheet priorities. Now every bank’s a little different, so some are more interested in loans than deposits, some are more fee income less, but fundamentally it’s a mix of they’re borrowing from the depositors, lending to the borrowers, and trying to make some fee income. So understanding that,

And it’s the blinding flash, the obvious of that’s how they make money. That’s what they need.

But grounding in that and then the tactics. So the tactics are, we hear people are constantly testing and learning on how do I deepen relationships with customers, attract new to bank customers. Certainly the impacts of data and privacy and AI are having a, changing the how. But one of the themes I heard on the panel was,

being grounded in what we’re trying to achieve and then being very intentional about building plans that are gonna make a difference in what the bank’s trying to achieve. need to, so I think one thing, one time, and certainly this conference has a lot of sizzle, but sometimes bankers, think sometimes marketers, I should say, under the umbrella of innovation,

speaker-0
or testing learning, we sometimes, and I put myself in this, sometimes can be distracted by the shiny object.

speaker-1
Yep, shiny object syndrome is what we call it.

speaker-0
And so now, so I think one of the hardest things for a marketer to do is say, I want enough testing that I can move the needle and not be stale, but not too much that I’m just doing a whole lot of activity that’s not going to pay off. Yeah, right. And so that, and then I community banks have the compounded effect of they just, there’s, there’s less hours in the day, but one of the advantages they have is they can move faster than a big bank and they can also tap into their, to their peer network.

So they don’t have to try everything themselves. One of the benefits they, one of the the panelists talked about is, know, OptiFi lets me tap into the wisdom of my peers all over the country. You can do that qualitatively too, but that’s where they’re not, they don’t have to test everything themselves. They can build that test plan on the back of other. Yeah, so.

speaker-1
in the community,

And going back to like the shiny object syndrome and making sure what you’re doing is working. One thing I would say to the CFO is when your marketing team brings you a new idea, don’t give the old way 10 years and the new way one week and declare the new way doesn’t work. But what I would tell the marketer is at the same time, start with the problem and know what you’re trying to solve versus this just seems really cool and I don’t really know what this is going to accomplish, but this is man, this is so cool. That’s right. So there’s a health.

balance there for sure. I guess last question for you, for bank marketing teams out there, you work with a lot of them. If you were to give them some advice on ways that they could start to implement AI in a way that was A, compliant with their bank’s policies and B, it’s not just shiny object syndrome, but it’s actually going to help move the needle and accomplish the goals that they have. Any tips on where they could start?

speaker-0
Yeah man that’s a great question and certainly in our industry there’s some compliance aspects right.

speaker-1
And those rules are being written as we speak. We probably don’t even know all the compliance rules that will be created over time. There’s a plane coming over our heads here. Like I say folks, this is live. That’s it. It’s helicopter I think.

speaker-0
Well, I think there’s lessons for the AI revolution in previous waves of innovation in banking. Certainly one of the more recent ones was mobile, one before that was social. You can go further back into ATMs or whatever. Well, a little hard to experiment with ATMs when they require a tractor to put in. So having a dialogue, having the conversation around

We’re gonna try some things. Having dialogue with your compliance partners is probably the most important one to make sure that, hey, they know that we’re gonna be experimenting and you want their help to understand where we are now and where.

speaker-1
together this is not an adversarial relationship where it’s marketing versus compliance it’s let’s be partners here and help the compliance team understand the revenue opportunities that could come from and help the marketers understand there are risks and real things to consider as you’re getting stuff approved.

speaker-0
That’s right. you know, so marketers need to have some patience, compliance need to understand that they can’t stay stuck in the past. So I think that’s really fundamental. And that’s going to vary everywhere. We work with a variety of different…

banks with different risk tolerances. And some of that’s driven by what’s happened in the past or just the unit to the team. So that answer is going to vary by bank. But I think the common thing is to start with those conversations and then also tap into the experience of others. Generative AI for content creation is a good place to start if you haven’t already because…

it still requires a human to review it before it’s published. So whether or not you create something in Microsoft Word or Photoshop or Copilot or Claude, if the output is going to be reviewed by a human, that’s the common control point. guess what? We’re already using software to create content. It might be a word processor or drawing program.

So that’s a natural path. And then I think, obviously, when content creation, you want to be careful that you still use some critical thought. That you’re using it as an accelerant, not a replacement for thinking. So that would be a good place to start. When it comes to analysis, that could be…

probably a harder place to go just because of some of the rules around models and data security, all that kind of stuff. That’s gonna require more, there are, know, most banks I talk to are clear to use copilot. Copilot’s integrated with Excel. There’s some, and Power BI and those kind of things, and so there’s some, you know, there’s some things you can do on analysis, but I think, to me, the…

speaker-0
the content creation is a great place to start.

speaker-1
That’s good. Well, Dan, folks want to connect with you and check out what you guys do, how can they find you?

speaker-0
Yeah, OptimaFI.com.

speaker-1
Great, well Dan, thanks for being part of our, I think, first ever live podcast from a bank conference. So we need to do more of these over time with folks as we’re out in the field. Thanks for being our guinea pig and testing it out for us. It’s been fun.

speaker-0
Awesome, Caleb, appreciate it.