The goal of City National Bank’s 2021 Personal Business Banking campaign was to highlight and grow Mortgage and Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) promotional offers by driving customer acquisitions in the Fall, ideally with their high-net-worth relationships.
Typically, HELOC and mortgage marketing campaigns take place in the Spring. However, City National Bank targeted Summer and Fall months, with the insight that given the still relatively low-interest environment and the rollout of vaccinations, consumer sentiment would be strong and competitive clutter would be low. Most retail lenders had pulled back from HELOC since the start of COVID, so a prime opportunity for CNB to reach clients and prospects presented itself.
The objectives of this campaign focused on the lower funnel, driving consideration of these offerings, and converting the target audience to sign up for a mortgage or HELOC through City National Bank. Additionally, City National Bank wanted to convey an offer of consolidation and simplification of a client’s financial bigger picture—the "Preferred" client offering—helping a client look holistically at both sides of their balance sheet, and leading to added financial benefits (e.g., relationship pricing, refinancing at lower rates, and competitive HELOC promotional rates).
City National Bank and Critical Mass aligned on brand direction and explored contextual creative that aligned with consumers’ use of City National Bank products and services to stand out across channels. Furthermore, new partner platforms were explored to drive efficiency in conversions and optimize in-market more effectively.
City National Bank and Critical Mass have learned that high-net-worth clients are looking for a relationship, trust, and competitive pricing when it comes to financial services. Other than the price, these factors can be intangible and tough to measure.
To effectively connect and resonate, we needed to use imagery and language that was straightforward, easy to identify, aligned to our audience’s aspirations (e.g., making home improvements, purchasing their dream home, buying a big-ticket item, or capitalizing on a financially smart decision). This led to creative assets that paired relevant and universally understood imagery with messaging and a tangible offer that welcomed clicks to learn more.
To ensure this messaging reached our audience at scale (during a flight window that was much shorter than anticipated), the Critical Mass and City National Bank team leaned heavily into learnings from prior campaigns. We pursued a 600% increase in spend on Facebook and Instagram (drastically changing our media mix vs. our prior campaigns), and we launched City National Bank's first ever paid activation on Pinterest. We also deployed Programmatic Digital Display and Paid Search within our mix, ensuring frequency across channels, driving potential customers to the site, and converting at much higher rate than we had ever seen in a prior ad campaign.
This campaign presented several unique challenges, especially around targeting parameters and the need to remain compliant with regulations on advertising-specific lending rates. Because normally available targeting levers like geo targeting by zip code (and others) needed to be strictly avoided for this campaign, we leaned heavily into context, relevance, and retargeting to ensure frequency against those we knew were primed or had shown interest in the product.
Through effective rate-driven messaging and our powerful mix of media partners in Paid Social, Digital Display, and Paid Search tactics, this campaign delivered very strong performance.
This marked a vast improvement from CNB's previous Personal Business Banking campaign in several aspects, but most notably in the form of:
These impressive increases all came from implemented learnings and insights from the previous campaign, the addition of new strategic partners, and diligent optimization within and across partners throughout the tight 8-week flight.
