Plenty of banks say they have a niche. "We do small business." "We love our farmers." Most of those aren't niches — they're brochure copy. A real niche is specific enough to build a program around, and the difference shows up in the results.

This week on The Bank Marketing Show, we interviewed Tammy O'Shea, CMO of Fidelity Bank, a $1B bank headquartered in New Orleans, about their niche program, P.O.W.E.R., for woman-owned, for-profit businesses. We're sharing a few key lessons here.

Three tests to run on any marketing idea?

1. Keep asking "who is this for, specifically?" until it hurts.

"Small business" is too big to be a niche. What kind of small business? What area? What do the businesses have in common, specifically? Think more in terms of shared goals: women-owned businesses, nonprofits, ag operators of a specific crop or county. Each time you narrow, ask again. The specificity is what lets you build a real niche marketing engine, which is something memorable instead of a tagline.

2. Check your portfolio and your market — both have to say yes.

Tammy O'Shea's rule: zero plus zero equals zero. The segment has to be big enough in your market to matter, and you need evidence you can actually win it. Think about loans you've already made, customers who already trust you, something you're already good at. Don't invent a niche out of thin air. Pull your last 20 commercial loans and look for the cluster.

3. Ask what you'd build for the niche, beyond the checking account.

This is the test most banks fail. If the whole plan is a special account and some social posts, it's a product, not a niche. P.O.W.E.R. customers get a special purple debit card - but that's a perk, not the value of the program. The value of P.O.W.E.R. is the 3,000-member community, the private Facebook group where members refer each other business, and the education program members pay their own money to attend. If you can't describe what you'd build around the segment like events, community, knowledge, a dedicated person who owns it, then keep thinking.

Pass all three and you have something worth taking to your board. It took Tammy a year to get hers approved. But nine years later, the board members are some of the program's biggest advocates!

At a community bank, your best social media content is already happening in your branches, your communities, and your customers' businesses. You just have to go find it. Yet when planning social media content, most banks think "What am I going to post today?" instead of collecting stories from around the bank.

In this episode, Ann Barilleaux, Senior Vice President and Marketing Director at JD Bank, a $1.2 billion community bank with 22 branches across South and Central Louisiana, explains the process her bank follows to collect and curate stories from around the bank. With a team of three, she runs a social media operation that gets real engagement, and how you can build something similar at your bank, no matter the size.

In this episode:

• The question Ann asks instead of "What am I going to post today?"

• How JD Bank decides which social media platforms to focus on

• The TikTok post with their CEO that unlocked buy-in across the whole bank — and an unexpected payoff in employee engagement

• Turning one ribbon cutting into a dozen pieces of content, and how one simple event can turn into months of content

• Why leading with people instead of products is what actually makes posts travel

• A hashtag strategy that borrows reach from your state association instead of going it alone

About our guest:

Ann Barilleaux is Senior Vice President and Marketing Director at JD Bank, headquartered in Jennings, Louisiana, where she has led marketing for 10 years. She directs all of the bank's marketing and creative efforts across 22 branches (with two more on the way) spanning Southwest and Central Louisiana — from industrial Lake Charles to Cajun French-speaking communities, each with marketing tailored to fit.

Resources:

• Connect with Ann Barilleaux

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ann-barilleaux-cfmp-mba-98587b3b/

• JD Bank: www.jdbank.com

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

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

• Contact: contact@bankmarketingshow.com

If someone walked past wearing your bank's tagline on a t-shirt, would anyone in town recognize it as your bank? For most banks, the answer is decidedly no. But there's real value in distilling your brand down to it's most memorable elements.

Patrick Dix spent 25 years in broadcast journalism before joining Shazam, where he's now Vice President of Client and Association Engagement and runs the Shazam Speakers Bureau — coordinating 120 speaking events a year across the country. He joins Dan and Chris to talk about why community bankers tell incredible stories at dinner and then genericize it to "strength, trust, commitment" on their ads, and how to close that gap.

• The t-shirt exercise: how to boil your bank's brand down to something your community can recognize at a glance

• The three categories nearly every community bank ad falls into

• How to not speak banker: what to do when you want to say things like "well-capitalized" and "remote deposit capture"

• Who's your "Mabel"? Knowing exactly who you're talking to before you tell the story

• The high school football ad that cost almost nothing and reached every aunt, uncle, and grandparent in town — plus why stories are remembered 22 times more than facts

Patrick Dix is Vice President of Client and Association Engagement at Shazam, where he runs the Shazam Speakers Bureau — coordinating about 120 speaking events a year and personally presenting at around 50. Before Shazam, he spent 25 years in broadcast journalism and holds a degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. If you attend state banking association conferences, odds are you'll run into him soon.

• Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickdix/

• Shazam: www.shazam.net

• The Bank Marketing Show: www.bankmarketingshow.com

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

• Contact: contact@bankmarketingshow.com