Kalamazoo County State Bank

Objective: Grow loans and deposits, one product at a time

Kalamazoo County State Bank is a community bank in southwest Michigan. Like most community banks, it competes with national lenders that outspend it online. The bank wanted to reach local borrowers and depositors with the right offer at the right time, and to stay in front of the customers it already has.

Web Ascender has run that program since 2019.

What Web Ascender Did

• Product campaigns - search, display, and Facebook campaigns built around the products the bank wants to grow: mortgages, home equity lines, rewards checking, auto loans, and construction loans, plus commercial lending
• A landing page for every campaign - each campaign leads to its own page, including a mortgage page with qualifying questions, a construction loan page, and a “How much house can I afford?” calculator
• Remarketing - display and social ads that follow up with people who visited a product page
• Tracking that holds up - conversion tracking across ads, forms, and the calculator, rechecked when the bank launched a new website, with leads routed to the right people at the bank
• Ongoing optimization - keyword and negative keyword management, budget pacing by product, location targeting to the bank’s market, and testing lead and traffic campaign goals to see which brings in better leads
• A monthly newsletter - written, designed, and scheduled every month, with an employee spotlight that also runs on the website
• Blog content - posts added and optimized on the bank’s site
• Reporting and planning - monthly reports, quarterly meetings, a year-end review, annual budget planning, and reporting the bank can hand to its examiners

The Outcome

For seven years the bank has had a steady, year-round marketing program: campaigns that change with the products and the season, landing pages built to convert, and a newsletter that keeps the bank in front of its customers every month. Web Ascender continues to run it.

The header photo is representative stock photography and the illustration uses sample data.