Tara Hersherger, PWM Media Director

For Pannos Winzeler Marketing 2011 was a year where emerging trends in Social Media and Interactive Marketing became essential components of our work for many clients. At the same time we continue to integrate traditional media with new media initiatives. We find this is a great way to optimize our clients’ campaigns. As we often say, fishing in many ponds is the way to increase your new business opportunities.

2011 Versus 2009 Snapshot

August 2011 Total Media Sales – Print 49% – Interactive 42% – Other 8%*

March 2009  Total Media Sales - Print 74% - Interactive 13% - Other 13%^{* Read the rest of this entry »}

Langdon Andews

Remember the year 2012. It will likely be the year that Interactive Marketing becomes a part of your media plan. In fact for many financial institutions that have already made the leap it will become an important part of their media plans. Print will (and should) still be present, however, in a reduced rolled.

According to the Pew Research Center in 2010 online advertising spending surpassed spending on newspapers by 2 billion dollars. Ad dollars are simply following our eyeballs as everyday more of us get our news online, spend hours visiting and updating Social Media sites and interacting with the world at large through the Internet. Our online time is rapidly beginning to dominate our leisure time at the expense of traditional channels like newspapers and television. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Bouchard, Director - Web Development

Until recently, websites were considered sufficient if they were attractively designed and provided informative content. Rarely did most websites consider the steps/process of adding to and updating that content. As a result, most websites remained unchanged with little new information because it was difficult, or expensive to make changes.

Today, your website is, more often than not, the first place consumers look to learn about your products and services. Your website is expected to serve many of the same functions as your branches – and it’s open 24/7.  New rates are continually posted, product info is updated, frequently there are cross-sells that need to be changed to reflect current promotions, educational content is being created and news and press releases are regularly being published. Read the rest of this entry »

Media & PR Director, Tara Hershberger, recently authored an article featured in the January/February issue of ABA Bank Marketing Magazine. If you’re currently using social media for your financial institution, or thinking of utilizing social platforms in the future, check it out!

Comments or questions? Email the author: Tara at Pannos Winzeler dot com

Tara Hershberger has written an article for Banker & Tradesman, Integrated Strategy Enhances Mobile Banking Launches.  If you are investigating the benefits of mobile banking or looking for ways to sign customers up drop us an email and we will be pleased to send a copy.

We would like to thank the clients and friends that stopped by the booth in Baltimore to say hello.

Pannos Winzeler Clients Present
We would also like to say a special thanks to Tom Brown, Senior VP, Retail Banking, Easthampton Savings Bank, Michael Seymour, Senior VP, Marketing & Retail Services, Franklin Savings Bank and Stephanie Healy, Marketing & Communications Specialist, Norway Savings  Bank for their presentations at the conference.

Stephanie and our own Tara Hershberger, Media Director, got things with started with a standing room only session: The Social Media Marketing Imperative: How to Sell Internally and Build Strategically. Their session covered all the important steps that are needed to get the internal green light to get started with Social Media then provided a step by step guide to ensure it will be successful.

Tom and Michael presented: Delivering a Seamless eBranch Experience to a full room Tuesday morning. They discussed the value of “action-based” websites that function as a virtual branch and sell products as effectively as a traditional branch. Two benefits that especially stood out were the lowering of the average customer age and the higher approval rate for online mortgages compared to those filled out in-branch.

Congratulations to Our Free Samples Prize Winners

As we have seen so many times with customers the Free Samples from the Vault builds traffic and gets a lot of conversations started. Thank you everyone for coming by. Our $100 winners were.

Yvonne “Rie” Atkinson, The Bank of Glen Burnie

Dan Swartz, ESB Bank

Lori Belding, Northfield Bank

Glenie Jones, Farmers Bank

Thanks again everyone that came by.  We are already looking forward to next year’s conference in San Diego.

Jim

Going to Baltimore? Visit our booth (#400) for a chance to win $100 and to learn about our proven branch traffic builder campaign, FREE Samples from the Vault™.

Also Tara, our Media and PR Director, will be presenting Sunday from 3:30-5:00 PM with Stephanie Healey, Marketing & Communications Specialist at Norway Savings Bank, on The Social Media Marketing Imperative: How to Sell Internally and Build Strategically. Session attendees will come away with ideas for planning, pitching and processes for implementing a social media strategy.

We’re looking forward to speaking with you!

Facebook has recently unveiled one of the biggest privacy overhauls in the company’s history.  Although there are implications for business pages, the majority of these changes directly affect personal accounts. Below is a brief overview of the new features:

• Profiles: users will have greater profile control as privacy settings now appear directly next to content posted to a user’s profile. Users can choose whether to publish items publically, only to friends or other subsets they’ve created. This may affect a brand’s search engine results and rankings if users choose to limit sharing of brand-related content only to certain groups.
• Tags: users can now approve and reject photo, status or location tags before they appear on their profile. Because of this new default setting and feature, Facebook will allow users to tag anyone in a photo, regardless of whether they are friends.
• Status Updates & Location: Users can now tag a location in any status update, photo or photo album, regardless of whether they are actually nearby. Location tags in users news feeds will make brands and deals more visible as they flow into friend’s news feeds.

For further reading, please reference Mashable’s Article Facebook’s Big Privacy Changes: An Overview.

Many bankers, looking to harness the power of the Internet to sell products and services, are recreating their websites from the traditional “electronic brochure racks” into eBranches designed to drive new business growth. For more information on why and how this can be accomplished, please read eBranches – The Future of Bank Websites by our Web Director, Mike Bouchard. For purposes of this article, however, I’d like to outline what it takes to get the maximum benefit from your new eBranch once the decision has been made to build and launch one. Read the rest of this entry »

Conversations about your brand continue when you close the doors for the night. Customers expect now more than ever to conduct business on their terms, and that means when it is convenient for them. With the shift to online banking in full swing, customers are more frequently reaching out to their financial institution on the weekends or evenings via social media hoping, and some expecting, to receive a response. There are 3 common questions about social media monitoring which we receive. Read the rest of this entry »