NEFMA Spring Conference

Banks spend heavily to reach new audiences, yet one of the most effective growth drivers already exists inside their customer base: family connections. As the largest wealth transfer in history moves forward, most families still lack a will and have no clear plan for where important documents live. This gap creates stress for customers—and a missed opportunity for banks.

In this session, Billie Connally, VP of Partnerships at Paige, is joined by Carie Kelly, SVP of Digital Banking at Claremont Savings Bank, to share how legacy planning can become a practical, low-cost marketing channel. Using real bank examples, they’ll show how normalizing planning helps customers invite spouses, adult children, and trusted contacts into the banking relationship—driving qualified leads, stronger loyalty, and longer-lasting connections. Attendees will leave with clear messaging ideas and simple steps to support customers without adding strain to internal teams. 

Back to what leadership actually cares about. Clicks. Impressions. Leads.

Meanwhile, the only question the exec team is asking is: Did we grow deposits? Did we fund more loans? Did we bring in new customers?

In this session, we’ll break down how data-backed marketing attribution helps Financial Institutions justify bigger budgets, sharpen targeting, and connect every campaign to real business impact like funded loans and customer growth. We’ll also walk through a real-world case study from Financial Institutions across the country showing how smart tracking, clean data, and optimized campaigns led to:-

• Higher loan conversion rates
• Stronger executive alignment
• Smarter strategy decisions (based on revenue, not guesswork)

HMC will lead an interactive session that will highlight the importance of the creative brief and its role as the foundation for media strategy and creative campaigns that build and strengthen brands — and, accelerate performance.
We'll start with the most meaningful way to define the target audience. Spoiler alert — it has very little to do demographics and geography. Because while the basics matter, the mindset of the audience is far more important than age, gender, and address when it comes to maximizing the value and impact of our media.
We’ll workshop different strategies for connecting with our audience — such as where in the marketing funnel the most effective brand-building and performance-driving messaging should be focused.

Today, the competition for a potential customer’s awareness is especially challenging for a marketing leader and team. With constant changes in the landscape to a finite budget and limited resources, a marketing team faces reduced performance and rising costs across media and resources on a daily basis. The traditional channels no longer work, and the dawn of new channels make it increasingly difficult to compete. At the same time, marketing is charged with increasing market share and driving growth. The expectations for marketing from leadership can be high. Gone are the days of marketing being just a cost center. The expectation is shifting rapidly to a performance-based revenue center. But without a strong foundation in the brand and alignment inside and out, an evolution to performance-based marketing and focus on revenue will not yield results. So how can marketing begin to make the shift to a center for revenue growth? It won’t come from strategy, creative or spend alone—it comes from alignment. When employees understand, believe in, and consistently deliver on brand, and the customer experience is aligned, growth becomes part of the culture and not just a goal.

This session will explore how a strong, clearly articulated brand will unite a culture inside and out around a shared vision of growth. You will see how engaging your leadership team, especially your Board/President/CEO, are all essential to making that vision stick. What are the steps and language to gain buy-in to a proposed rebrand?We will review how memorable and integrated messaging can make all the difference. In this session, you will learn step‑by‑step how one bank capitalized on a timely rebrand and turned it into a superpower for growth in less than a year by igniting employee passion and strengthening customer loyalty—achieving its best year ever.Attendees will gain practical insights on turning brand from a marketing function into a leadership-driven and employee/customer-activated growth engine.

Come learn how a small and nimble team made brand a priority and breathed new life into a 170+ year old bank—without losing its essence or history.

Five years ago, ranking #1 on Google was the finish line. Today, your clients are asking ChatGPT for mortgage advice, getting retirement planning tips from Gemini, and making financial decisions before they ever click a single link. The search landscape has fundamentally changed — and the financial marketers who understand this shift first are the ones who will own their market. In this session, we'll walk through the data behind the behavior shift, explain why your traffic reports look different than they did two years ago, and make the case that your compliance culture, your regulatory credentials, and your institutional credibility are actually your biggest AI-era assets. Come ready to rethink what visibility means — and leave with a clear plan to build it.

At a time when authentic connection matters more than ever, financial marketers must harness social media not just for visibility but for measurable business impact. But what, exactly, does that look like? This session provides practical, applicable dos and don’ts for social media content and strategy. That means insights on creating social content that builds trust, strengthens community relationships, and drives tangible outcomes like deposit growth and advocacy.

Community banks continue to lose market share to larger banks. Year after year, NEFMA conference after NEFMA conference, we find ourselves having many of the same conversations – how do we stand out in a sea of sameness, how do we get more value out of our marketing budgets, and how do we get the next generation of customers to care about local banks the way their parents and grandparents did? 
Your brand can’t do it all. So we’ll discuss tactics to deploy your brand in ways that transcend traditional ‘glossy awareness advertising’. These tactics shorten the distance between consideration and intent and use your brand in unexpected late-funnel ways.
Blurring the lines between awareness media and consideration media isn’t a new topic, but we take the idea and turn it into a holistic removal of all barriers and lines that makeup the traditional sales funnel. 
We’ll discuss how to use technology to flatten the funnel and then use your people to stretch the funnel wider. 
We’ll discuss ‘chicken-or-the-egg’ scenarios: how can you sell a financial product to a customer that doesn’t know you exist? But also flip it: how can you make people aware of your bank, without squandering money with the flimsy goal of ‘increasing awareness’? 
The conventional wisdom says to use brand awareness tactics to help shorten the distance between ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration’ – but what if we could use ‘brand’ to shorten the distance between ‘consideration’ and ‘intent’ as well? Or better: tactics that turn the sales funnel on its head, leading with end-cycle intent. It’s the method that large banks can afford to do, but local banks unnecessarily fear. 
We’ll present case studies that show real world examples of media tactics, brand tactics, and marketing tactics that dismantle the traditional sales funnel and lead to sustaining growth.
We’ll also juxtapose these case studies with national banks, showing how their built-in awareness seemingly frees them to take risks that local banks too often shy away from. 
While these are broad-brush topics, there are also very specific topics that we’ll cover, including: 

• Rich media “Branded acquisition” tactics – the dos and don’ts 
  
• The paid search ecosystem – how to lead your marketing mix with intent 
  
• How to avoid the murky community bank “brand slop” permeating the industry 
  
• How regression analysis can uncover insights that aren’t always obvious 
  
• How to turn local "community newspapers" and similar properties into performance drivers instead of community obligations. 
  
• How your people – at every level – can utilize your brand to shorten the sales cycle 
  

The takeaway will be how to deploy your brand in powerful but unexpected ways that move the needle in sales and growth. The session will be one part right-side of the brain: what do we do to make our brand more powerful and aspirational? And one part left-side of the brain: how can we grow faster and move the needle in sales? The takeaway will be how to marry both objectives using new technologies, methods and media to make your brand work harder in a crowded and competitive market. 

For years, marketers have been told they need to “reach Gen Z.” But most guidance stops at stereotypes, surface-level channel lists, or trend-chasing tactics that don’t translate into real engagement or trust. The reality is more complex—and more urgent. Gen Z has fundamentally different expectations around communication, privacy, authenticity, and brand behavior. And Gen Alpha, now entering their teen years, is being shaped by an even more fragmented, creator-driven, and algorithmic world. Traditional outreach models—especially email-first, SMS-heavy, or interruption-based approaches—are increasingly ineffective, and in some cases actively rejected. In this session, Tom Stirling explores how Gen Z actually behaves, how they interpret brand outreach, and what CMOs need to rethink now to stay relevant—not just for today’s younger audiences, but for the next decade of growth. Rather than focusing on novelty platforms or short-lived trends, this session breaks down the structural shifts happening in how younger audiences communicate, evaluate brands, and decide when (and if) to engage. Topics include why SMS norms are changing, how private and semi-private channels are replacing public feeds, why “always-on” brand presence can backfire, and how younger audiences distinguish between brands that understand context versus those that simply show up. Attendees will learn how Gen Z’s preference for opt-in, contextual, and asynchronous communication impacts channel strategy—across social, community platforms, messaging, and owned media. The session will also explore how creator ecosystems, peer validation, and cultural fluency influence credibility far more than polished brand messaging. Importantly, this is not a session about abandoning fundamentals. It’s about recalibrating them. Tom will share practical frameworks for adapting existing brand, content, and CRM strategies to better align with younger audiences—without chasing every new platform or diluting brand integrity.
Looking ahead, the session will also touch on Gen Alpha: what early signals marketers should pay attention to, what’s likely to carry forward from Gen Z, and where assumptions may break down entirely. The goal is to help marketing leaders future-proof their approach—not by predicting trends, but by understanding behaviors. This session is designed for CMOs and senior marketers who want clear, actionable guidance on how to engage younger audiences thoughtfully, responsibly, and effectively—without gimmicks, jargon, or generational clichés.