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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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