By Ally Akins
Bank marketers are no strangers to change. Over the last decade, the role of a bank marketer has evolved from brand steward to strategic business partner, with marketing leaders increasingly reporting directly to bank executives. Now, another shift is underway: marketing as a growth function, directly accountable for generating sales, revenue and impacting the bottom line.
Vaishali Willis, marketing manager at HomeTrust Bank in North Carolina, says, “We’re no longer just storytellers and placing ads — we’re responsible for finding ways to connect with our customers and potential customers in measurable, effective ways that drive outcomes.”
Marketing has historically been thought of as an awareness-building function, with traditional communications and advertising responsibilities. This is still the case in many institutions. In a 2023 survey of bank marketers below, the primary responsibilities falling under marketing’s purview remained advertising, branding, social media and communications.
The shift underway
In many banks, however, marketing has evolved from primarily a communications function to a partner with lines of business to grow revenue. This evolution has been evident for years but gained momentum during the pandemic, when branches and in-person communications channels were out of commission. It has become even more essential as interest rates have squeezed industry profits.
In the second quarter 2025 survey of ABA bank marketers, only 25% of respondents received additional marketing spend to contribute to their institution’s deposit growth, highlighting a missed opportunity for marketing to align with strategic objectives.
Outside the banking industry, marketers in nearly every other industry are being held accountable for measurable business growth. According to a June 2024 Airtable survey of over 550 marketing leaders, 88% of marketing leaders are responsible for meeting a revenue goal.
For many banks, the transformation can feel daunting. Budgets are tighter, teams are small, and transforming marketing into a revenue engine can sound like a multi-year overhaul.
But growth marketing does not begin with massive changes or innovations. It starts small—with incremental tests, new ways of communicating results internally, and smarter use of customer data.
The path to growth marketing is built step by step, starting with better collaboration with your sales team, tying campaigns more closely to sales outcomes, and testing and learning across the organization’s priorities.
Adopt a test-and-learn mindset
It can be tempting to wait for the perfect opportunity to start implementing tests or certain best practices — when the team is in place, when technology has been implemented, or when a certain campaign has executive attention. However, there will never be one perfect opportunity to launch a campaign. Starting small with each campaign and shifting towards a campaign focused on continuous improvements and test-and-learn can be an easy first step.
“Let’s not let perfect get in the way of better. We can fail fast at a small scale, learn, and expand — perfection isn’t the goal, progress is,” says Jessica Gardner, chief marketing officer at Academy Bank in Kansas City, Missouri. Depending on the segment or target audience, this can be as small as subject line testing and results reporting on a customer email campaign or as big as changing the product or target audiences. Continuously communicating the results and demonstrating this to your internal clients and leadership can show that the marketing team is focused on incremental improvements to generate additional ROI for the institution.
Become the bank sales team’s best friend
Too often, marketing and sales in banks operate in silos, each with clear but disconnected roles — marketing builds awareness and interest, while sales focuses on engagement and conversion. This divide leads to inefficiencies, duplicated effort, and missed growth opportunities. Shifting marketing into a true growth partner starts by reframing the relationship from service provider to collaborator. When marketing understands sales’ daily challenges and focuses on shared outcomes—like qualified leads, opened accounts, revenue growth, and customer retention—the dynamic transforms from “pretty brochures” to “enabling deals.”
For Academy Bank, Jessica explains, “Collaboration starts even with budgets. We build our plans alongside business unit sales leaders to go to the board as one team — marketing and sales delivering on shared growth goals.”
Becoming a growth partner means speaking the same language and aligning around measurable business results. Instead of reporting impressions and clicks, marketing teams can translate data into metrics that matter to bankers — cost per loan, revenue per campaign, and conversion rates by segment. This is the foundation of sales enablement, where marketing equips frontline staff with actionable insights, content and tools that help them have better conversations and close more business. Real alignment emerges through shared playbooks, consistent feedback loops and joint accountability for performance.
Establish a shared growth goal that both teams can rally around. Create a simple lead management process that ensures qualified opportunities don’t fall through the cracks. Celebrate joint wins publicly to reinforce collaboration and trust. Over time, these efforts evolve into a “revenue operations” mindset — where marketing, sales, and even customer service work as one system to attract, convert, and grow relationships. Progress, not perfection, is the key to shifting marketing from a support function to a true growth engine.
Getting started
To tie marketing back to strategic and business outcomes, use data-driven insights, clear communication, and continuous optimization to effectively link marketing activities with sales results.
- Start early and collaborate regularly. As soon as business goals and key performance Indicators are agreed upon, work with data analytics and Business Intelligence partners to design performance reporting dashboards.
- Connect top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel metrics. Performance reporting dashboards that integrate traditional marketing metrics (e.g., views, clicks, brand awareness lift) with sales-driven outcomes (e.g., accounts opened, deposit and loan balances generated, new household growth) start to connect the dots for all members of the sales and marketing teams that these outcomes have direct impacts on one another.
- Build a robust digital attribution infrastructure. Digital ads, web landing pages, online applications, and programmatic buying platforms designed with robust tracking capabilities. This infrastructure will identify which digital mediums (e.g., Facebook, Google, specific local digital publications) drive landing page visits and completed applications.
- Review frequently and make adjustments. Digital marketing campaigns require constant attention due to the iterative nature of digital media algorithms. As Willis says, “There’s no ‘set it and forget it’ anymore. You have to start, learn, optimize, and continue — every channel is a living, breathing action you have to care for.” Weekly meetings are ideal for reviewing detailed media and sales reports involving marketing, sales, digital channel teams, and ad agency representatives.
- Integrate sales enablement. Marketing can develop and deploy sales enablement tools and materials (e.g., segment product and messaging guides, event and activation toolkits, cross-sell kits, etc.) to directly support bankers’ lead nurturing and conversion efforts.
Attempt to tie every marketing effort — whether a brand awareness campaign or a targeted performance initiative — directly to measurable business outcomes. Instead of treating brand campaigns as intangible investments, start small by tracking their impact on downstream sales metrics. For instance, monitor whether exposure to brand ads leads to increased conversion rates or higher-quality leads entering the sales funnel. Establishing clear links between marketing activities and sales results creates accountability and demonstrates marketing’s tangible contribution to revenue growth.
This approach requires integrating performance marketing and brand building, ensuring both are aligned toward shared sales objectives. By measuring marketing ROI across all initiatives, teams can optimize campaigns based on impressions and clicks and their influence on sales conversion and customer retention. Reviewing these metrics with sales counterparts fosters collaboration, shared accountability, and continuous improvement.
Ally Akins is the sales and marketing practice co-lead at Capital Performance Group, a strategic consulting firm that assists banks in designing and optimizing marketing strategies.
