10 Banks // 10 Accounts
for Mabus Agency
Early in my time at Mabus Agency, the boss handed me the perfect assignment to bridge my prior career as a journalist into my new role in advertising. I was tasked to open an account at 10 different banks of various sizes and regions, then blog about various aspects of my experience.
The truth is, banks offer parity products, and their messaging usually draws from the same well of "relationship-focused" "service-oriented" "community banking" bank-speak that makes customers' eyes glaze over.
My task was to answer perhaps the biggest question in the industry. A question every bank wants to know, but will not take the first step in finding out: What makes one bank different from another?
I defined the experiences by which I would judge each bank and wrote all blog posts. You can explore the entire series at 10accounts.com
Big Banks & Little Banks
Blog Series Planning
In selecting the banks we wanted to sample in the 10 Banks // 10 Accounts series, we wanted to assess a wide spectrum of banking options. No banks in this sampling are Mabus Agency clients, and we kept them anonymous to preserve a lack of bias in the series.
Our roster included a few evolutions and sizes of community banks, including a few at the top of the heap who had gained more regional traction through either de novo or M&A growth. As outliers, we included a popular, totally online neobank and a national top-10 megabank.
The Story & The Full Report
Blog Series Planning
It only made sense that the qualities by which to judge these banks should follow the journey a genuine potential customer would take.
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Brand & Website: The impression a bank makes before the customer ever steps foot in a branch.
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Walk-In Experience: How a branch handles a new customer who walks in off the street.
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Mobile App: How well the app facilitates the functions of everyday banking.
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Financial Education: Whether the bank walks the walk about empowering customers financially.
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Correspondence: What communications, upsells, and offers the bank sends post-signup.
I carried out and tracked these actions over the course of a year. As I blogged about each experience, not all of my copious notes and insights made it into the narrative of the blog. So we put out two versions of the blog: The Story, and the Full Report. The Story makes broad observations about the blog's theme, while the Full Report sums up each bank's performance in just a few sentences.
Distributing the Series
Blog Series Planning
The series lasted an entire year and helped fill out the Mabus Agency content calendar quite a bit. The blogs were sliced and diced into micro-content readymade for social media.
Banks were paying attention. Sign-ups for email updates announcing new blogs blew up and incited a valuable conversation within the banking industry. Many new clients came to Mabus Agency having read the series.