The Digital Marketing Playbook for Banks & Credit Unions

For banks and credit unions, digital marketing can feel like a moving target. Regulations shift, platforms change overnight, and internal priorities compete for your attention. We’ve been in your shoes, and after years of helping financial institutions navigate this space, we know what it takes to build a strategy that delivers measurable business results.

You already know your real business goals, e.g. driving more deposits, account openings, mortgage loans, or strengthening brand trust, and you know who you want to reach. The real challenge is execution: knowing what effort is required, and where to focus it. Too often, marketing decisions default to being on the most popular/trendy platforms or repeating what’s worked in the past.

Here’s what you need to be successful in digital marketing. Consider this our roadmap to tangible, long-term results.

1. Invest in a Strong Foundation

Driving traffic is only half the job. To be successful, your digital infrastructure should:

• Deliver mobile-first, conversion-optimized landing pages.
  
  • Find more advice on optimizing landing pages here.
• Tag every meaningful interaction (button clicks, form starts, calculators).
  
  • At RAIN, we tag all landing page actions with a three-tier conversion system based on the user’s level of intent. These categories allow us to optimize our campaigns more effectively and provide high-value reporting that gives real insights.
• Integrate into your application portal when possible to track outcomes end-to-end. (This often requires vendor cooperation and cross-domain linking.)
• Include the right tech stack — GTM, GA4, CRM integrations — to ensure campaigns are measurable, auditable, and future-ready.

This trellis will keep your marketing vine growing strong with accountability and transparency for both your leadership team and your regulators.

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2. Match Goals to Channels

With an unlimited budget, you could be everywhere. In reality, you need to prioritize. A strong strategy matches each channel to the specific job it does best:

Awareness & Brand Trust‍

• Display & Video Ads: Top- and mid-funnel visibility; get on the radar of new prospects.
• Social Media Ads: A powerful force in marketing today which is actually full-funnel, offering awareness, engagement, and conversion all-in-one if utilized appropriately.  
• Programmatic/CTV: Targeted reach in defined geographies; useful for CRA and LMI objectives.

Consideration & Engagement

• Website Optimization/SEO: Always-on foundation; ensures discoverability and relevance.
• Organic Social Media: Build community engagement and reputation.  

Conversion, Retention, and Cross-Selling

• Search Ads (Google & Bing): Bottom-of-funnel capture of intent-driven prospects (e.g., “best HELOC rates near me”).
• Email, App Notifications, SMS (Text Marketing): Direct lines to existing customers for cross-sell and retention.

A checking campaign behaves differently than a mortgage or CD campaign. We’ve managed them all and know how to adjust accordingly. At RAIN, we look at the product, website, audience, and budget to find the most cost-effective combination of platforms. We build multi-channel campaigns that balance reach, efficiency, and compliance, so you’re not just “in digital,” but in the right places with the right weights.

💡 Pro Tip: across every digital channel, remember to prioritize a mobile-first approach.  Most users (especially younger generations, but even Baby Boomers!) now engage with your institution on phones first, so creative, landing pages, and other experiences must be designed with mobile devices in mind.

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3. Design Creative That Connects

Even the best digital marketing plans will fall flat without high-quality creative. To cut through the noise, financial institutions need messaging and visuals that are not only compliant but also relatable, relevant, and engaging. Whether it’s a social ad, a video, or your own landing page, creative and messaging are what turn impressions and clicks into real connections.  

Practical tips to get started:

• Take inventory. Review your website, ads, landing pages, and emails to see if they feel outdated, overly generic, inconsistent, or disconnected from your audience’s reality. Talk to your team and figure out what and where you’re already doing well, and why. You may uncover some great ideas of niche specialties to lean further into.
• ‍Focus on relevance and storytelling. Use language and imagery that reflects your customers’ actual needs (first home mortgages, small business cashflow, saving for college) instead of generic financial jargon. Use real people and real scenarios to build trust and relatability. ‍
• Refresh regularly. Avoid “set it and forget it.” Creative fatigue sets in fast; plan refresh cycles tied to campaign timelines. We find 2 months is a good rule of thumb for display campaigns, for example, although we anchor these timing decisions to ad frequency, reach, and performance decay per channel.  

Our FI-specialized creative team uses benchmark data to identify the creative types, formats, and messages that perform best across each platform, aligns them seamlessly with your brand, and refreshes assets quickly, ensuring compliance every step of the way. The result: creative that isn’t just attractive but proven to convert.

❗️ Note: Compliance should not be thought of as an annoying checkbox or an afterthought; rather, it’s something we bake into our creative strategy and never use as an excuse for low performance.

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4. Refine Your Targeting with Data

You already know the segments that matter. Special Ad Category rules limit demographic and granular geo targeting, but precision is still possible. First-party data is powerful: CRM lists, email subscribers, app users, and website retargeting pools give you precision without violating compliance rules. On their own, however, first-party lists have limits: they need to be very large to scale effectively, and repeated use can cause serious ad fatigue, leading to disengaged customers and a growing unsubscribe rate.  

That’s why the most effective approach blends your first-party data with the targeting capabilities of Meta, Google, and others. These platforms expand your reach while still respecting compliance rules. When you layer in cross-channel retargeting, reaching the same individuals with video/display, social, and search, the results multiply synergistically.

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5. Measure & Report the Right KPIs

Reporting should be real-time for quick pivots, and in-depth enough for leadership and regulators to understand performance. While impressions, clicks, and CTR have their place, the most valuable KPIs for you are those that connect to your institution’s goals.  

Macro KPIs to track: New account openings, loan applications submitted, deposits opened, Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Supporting metrics to watch: Conversion rates, engagement, frequency, incremental bounce rates (on websites and applications)

By balancing big-picture KPIs with supporting signals, you ensure your campaigns stay aligned with the outcomes that actually move the needle for your institution.

✚ Bonus: Ask us about how we have provided audit-approved, census tract level reporting for CRA campaigns.

Example: Practical Steps For Deposit Growth in 2026

Bringing it all together, let's say your institution’s goal is to grow deposits by $50M in 2026.

Tech & KPIs

‍Set up the essentials — a solid, brief, informative website, and GTM + GA4 for tracking. For deposits, measure what counts: account openings, balances, and cost per depositor. Use supporting metrics (conversion rate, engagement, frequency) to provide context and inform your campaign management team of what dials to turn and levers to pull.

Campaign Mix

• Awareness: Display, video, social, and community sponsorship campaigns that highlight your deposit products and position your institution as the safe, trusted choice.‍
• Consideration: Landing Page content and matching Search ads for “high-yield savings,” “CD rates,” and similar queries. Programmatic/CTV can spotlight deposit offers in key geographies and audiences.
• ‍Conversion: Cross-channel retargeting with display and social ads to optimize conversion rates. Email, SMS, and in-app messaging to cross-sell to existing customers and keep them engaged with new deposit products.

Creative

‍Tailor messaging around what resonates with your selected audience(s) — customer reviews or stories and transparent rates, for example. Make sure all experiences are designed with mobile devices in mind!

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Develop A Team

Even with the best plan, execution takes resources. Some institutions handle everything in-house, and while that's possible (depending on your growth goals), it often takes a team. Others lean on agencies or tech partners. For those, the key is knowing what to look for:

• Choose vendors who understand both compliance requirements and real performance metrics.
• Always have at least one internal point person responsible for communication and accountability.
• Ask for clarity on reporting: not just impressions and clicks, but how campaigns connect to your core business goals. (Allowing your marketing partner access to any online application journey analytics, for example, is of utmost importance!)

⚙️ Remember: it isn't about running a perfect campaign or trying to go viral; it’s about creating a system that consistently works to grow your institution in real, material ways, regardless of a constantly shifting digital marketing environment.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” - James Clear

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, success in financial marketing doesn’t come from one channel or tactic. It comes from a multi-channel strategy, supported by the right data infrastructure, designed to drive long-term, needle-moving results.  

At RAIN, that’s what we deliver — with the added advantage that we don’t just market your products, we understand them. That’s how we help you turn strategy into results.

If you have the internal resources to build it yourself, this roadmap gives you the framework to be successful. If you need a long-term partner who already knows the challenges and opportunities facing banks and credit unions, we’re here to help you.

Schedule a discovery call today.

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