The Future of Marketing for Community Banks

In a world where AI is everywhere and the competition to get your message across is fierce, community banks are turning to the ancient art of storytelling to build strong marketing campaigns.

Here’s how Hilary Blackburn, senior director of sales development, product and marketing for Potomac Bank in Charles Town, West Virginia, describes her marketing philosophy: “We’re looking at ways to promote who we are, what we do [and how we help grow communities] in a fashion that’s convincing and engaging, draws attention, positions our brand, and helps communities carry our voice and tell our story.”  

What’s more, a “focus on the local, the human and the fun” will continue to characterize marketing in 2026, according to Vanessa Hanson, ICBA’s digital and social engagement director. 

“A lot of the time, bankers are sitting on goldmines of community stories,” she says. “Because they’re helping businesses grow and they’re helping families buy a home, they have so many stories that they could be sharing—and sharing these stories is the best way to connect with an audience.” 

It doesn’t take a Jane Austen to craft a storyline or a Steven Spielberg to shoot a compelling banking video. In fact, the simplest ideas often play best.

At FNB Community Bank in Midwest City, Oklahoma, the first social media post to garner a million views was a recipe for pumpkin sopapilla cheesecake, recalls Julie Waddle, senior vice president of marketing at the $500 million-asset community bank. 

One morning in 2017, Waddle was daydreaming about a baking project and realized that “for everything you buy to make a recipe, you use your bank debit card.” She then baked a cheesecake, publishing the recipe on the bank’s blog and linking all parts of the recipe back to the FNB website.

Communicating in a recognizable and appealing voice might also be precisely what hooks an audience.

Owned and operated by the same family for four generations, FNB prides itself on being consumer friendly and specializing in small business owners’ needs. “Our marketing voice is authentic and approachable, not super formal,” Waddle says.

“People buy from people, and people bank with people,” she says. “So, when I’m making new content, I try to add someone’s friendly face for a more personal approach.”

Video marketing tips

The number of community bankers making video content seems likely to grow in 2026.

Lindsey Cope, director of marketing at Marion Community Bank in Montgomery, Alabama, exemplifies this trend. Implementing an idea from the book Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller, Cope identifies key customers and requests testimonials from them as a way to market customers as the heroes of the $350 million-asset community bank.

“One of my plans is to do some brand storytelling by making our customers the heroes,” Cope says. “When it comes to social media content, video is king.”

Potomac Bank is taking a similar tack. Known as Bank of Charles Town until last November, the community bank made a two-minute video that weaves quotes from clients into a comprehensive explanation of why the bank changed its name, says Blackburn. 

Similarly, in 2024, Potomac Bank showcased client and local business consultant Courtney Jordan in a one-minute promotional video. Jordan directly addressed the camera, explaining why she made the switch from a large national bank to a community bank.  

“Testimonials resonate with our community,” says Blackburn. She also notes that abandoning a bank-centered strategy in favor of one where the client becomes the true hero is a paradigm shift worth making. 

“We’re saying that our [clients] are the heroes, because they’re the ones building businesses,” she explains. “We’re just the guides.” 

Not only is video a great vehicle for customer testimonials, it’s also a way to make an impression through playful humor.

“The more creative we are, and the more eyeballs that we can get, the better,” says Waddle. In FNB’s recent 10-second Instagram video, a man in a bank branch is filmed furtively running away. On screen, it says, “When a serial killer is chasing you, but they mention they need a new bank…” and the man turns around and flashes a business card bearing the FNB logo.

Waddle notes that the man being chased is a bank employee (not to mention her brother-in-law). “Every time I have an employee in a post, it increases our reach,” she says. “The algorithm supports seeing people’s faces and not just words and graphics on the screen. It also makes the employee feel seen and appreciated.”

Which is the best social platform?

While the community bank marketers we interviewed overwhelmingly cited Facebook as their go-to social media platform, Instagram and LinkedIn are popular, too. YouTube was also favorably mentioned as a platform worth exploring further in the coming year.

But X (formerly Twitter) seems to have lost its luster. “For several years, X was very hot and heavy in the banking world, but it’s falling off my radar,” says Waddle. “I’m finding it’s become too negative.”

Finally, while community banks remain bullish on social media as a marketing tool, not everyone is equally thrilled.

“The difficulty in social media is that people don’t really want to follow banks all that much,” asserts Janel Schmitz, communications and marketing manager at $10 billion-asset Bank of North Dakota (BND) in Bismarck, North Dakota.

The goal for community banks, then, must be to make their social content worth watching.

Engaging customers through social media contest

Community bankers can garner greater attention by creating opportunities for employees and customers to actively participate in a shared activity, says Cope.

For instance, last Halloween, Marion Community Bank achieved a 10-year high for social media visibility after each of the bank’s six branches was asked to design and decorate its own pumpkin as part of a bank-wide contest. 

“People love people and are looking for ways to connect with the community,” says Cope. “If you can get your team to buy in on your social media platform, you have an advantage.”

Cope has also successfully engineered contests to boost the bank’s online reviews by giving every branch a business card with a QR code to distribute to customers, who then post their reviews on Google. “It’s a fun, healthy competition that rallies our team and generates meaningful customer feedback,” she says. 

Using a bank’s employees to drive social media engagement is a strategy that’s also endorsed by Kemi Simmons, chief marketing officer at Grand Bank in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. To this end, she highlights the work anniversaries of employees at the $300 million-asset community bank. 

“Any time I have an opportunity to feature some of our associates in social media posts, I always do,” says Simmons, noting that these posts are often shared, driving more engagement. She also likes sending the message “that what the bank is really about is the people who work here.”

Other bank marketers actively strive to educate through social media and email campaigns. Based in Wichita, Kansas, $826 million-asset Legacy Bank is prioritizing fraud education and digital tool adoption in its marketing campaigns, according to marketing vice president Abby Parker. One particularly successful campaign highlighted credit card controls and how they can help prevent fraud.

Parker says that “email will be a huge focus for 2026, because we’re seeing really great open rates for the emails we’re sending.”

Measuring marketing success

As a rule of thumb, Waddle says that a typical bank marketing budget should fall within the range of 0.05% to 0.07% of an institution’s total assets. To secure even that level of funding, however, most marketers are scrambling to justify their efforts in an arena where success is notoriously difficult to measure.

When it comes to getting approval for offbeat Instagram posts and other more experimental endeavors, Waddle knows that she is fortunate to be a descendant of FNB’s founders. “I never need to send things up the chain, so to speak,” she says.

Even so, she leans heavily on social media, because impressions there are measurable. Each month, for instance, she reports to the board about numbers of engagements and followers.

Cope is committed to finding meaningful ways to explain what marketing does and why these efforts matter. For her, tying Marion Community Bank’s marketing campaigns to tangibles like views and clicks is essential. She therefore looks at every marketing campaign with a view toward collecting as much data as possible and tying that data to ROI.

Schmitz of BND urges community bankers to explore the many sophisticated tools out there to manage data. She works closely with a BND employee whose job it is to make the most of the data management tools included in the Microsoft Office suite.

Beyond that, the calculations draw on multiple data sources to guide communications decisions. 

“At the end of the day, the measure of our success is our reputation,” concludes Schmitz. “I make it my business to know what North Dakotans think about [community banks], and what they think and say is very positive.”

New technologies, new horizons

Many community bankers are experimenting with how AI can quickly generate polished content and improve the reach of overextended marketing teams.

As the sole marketer at FNB, Waddle views AI as an answer to understaffing. “At this point, AI is my favorite coworker,” she jokes.   

Specifically, Waddle uses ChatGPT and other AI tools to rework content previously made for Instagram and Facebook. “All I have to do is take a social media caption and ask AI to formulate it as an email campaign,” she explains. “I just say, ‘I want to reach this audience with an email that’s this length,’ and it does all the work for me.”

Another technology helping bank marketers do more with less is geotargeting for digital ads.

Cope says Google ads can now be precisely aimed at individuals who meet specific financial criteria or who have engaged in past searches that indicate possible interest. 

One recent example is a home equity line of credit (HELOC) that Marion Community Bank wanted to market exclusively to homeowners above a certain income threshold. Instead of a scattershot approach, Cope purchased digital ads directed only to those individuals who met her criteria.

Meanwhile, new technologies are fueling a growing interest in podcasting.  

In 2026, BND will launch its own podcast. Schmitz plans to invite experts on as guests to talk about fintech initiatives and the various forces affecting North Dakota’s economy. 

As these community banks have shown, marketing in 2026 and beyond will be a mix of the tried-and-tested and the experimental. But above all, it will be built on these banks’ deep knowledge of their communities.

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