By Erinn Steffen
For years, succession planning has largely been treated as a conversation about continuity: Who will take over the business? Is the next generation prepared? What happens when the founder retires? Those questions remain important, but for banks, there is another worth asking: What happens to the financial relationship when ownership changes?
More than 2.3 million Baby Boomer-owned businesses are expected to transition ownership over the next decade. For banks serving small and midsize businesses, each transition can trigger financing needs, deposit movement, changes to treasury relationships and new wealth management or advisory opportunities. It can also create one of the most vulnerable points in a long-standing banking relationship. Succession, therefore, should not be viewed solely as a risk to manage. It can also be a targeted growth opportunity that marketing teams are uniquely positioned to help banks act on.
Using data already available within the institution, strategic marketing can help banks identify clients likely to experience an ownership transition and develop targeted strategies to protect and grow those relationships. Marketers can then apply the same criteria to external audiences to identify similar prospects, turning succession planning into a strategy for both retention and new customer acquisition.
Finding the opportunity within the portfolio
The first step is understanding where succession exposure already exists. Rather than developing a broad campaign for all business owners, marketers can use portfolio and customer data to create a more precise target audience.
Three criteria provide a useful starting point:
- Is the primary owner age 55 or older?
- Does the business operate in an industry where ownership is difficult to transfer because of labor shortages, licensing requirements or specialized expertise?
- Is the transition likely to create a financing need?
Banks can then combine these insights with data on commercial deposits, C&I balances, CRE exposure and geography to identify relationships where an ownership transition could have the greatest financial impact. The result is an actionable audience based on both the likelihood of transition and the potential opportunity surrounding it.
Industry should be an important part of that analysis. Two businesses with owners over age 60 may have very different succession paths if one can easily transfer to a family member while the other requires specialized licensing, skilled labor and significant capital to acquire.
Marketing teams can use these distinctions to identify one or two high-potential industries and prioritize their resources for targeted campaigns accordingly. If analysis reveals concentrations of older owners in construction or HVAC, for example, and those industries also have significant succession challenges and financing needs, they may represent strong audiences for targeted outreach. This approach gives marketers a far more strategic starting point than a generic succession planning campaign.
Engage current clients before competitors do
Once priority audiences are identified, marketing can develop campaigns specifically designed to protect and grow those relationships. The key is to reach owners while succession is still a consideration and not after a transaction is underway, or when competitors, buyers and advisors have already entered the conversation.
Email campaigns, treasury platform messaging, industry-specific landing pages, guides, webinars, and events can address issues owners are likely to encounter, including business valuation, preparing for a sale, transferring ownership to employees or family members and financing an acquisition. As an existing banking partner, business owners expect you to know about them and their company. However, content should create engagement without assuming an owner is ready to sell.
For example, an HVAC contractor in his late 50s may not respond to an email asking whether he is preparing to exit his business. But he may find value in a guide outlining financial questions to consider before transitioning an HVAC company or a webinar featuring a CPA discussing valuation and ownership-transfer options.
From there, marketing automation can nurture the relationship. Someone who downloads a guide could receive follow-up content about valuation or financing, while a customer attending a succession webinar might enter a different journey based on their industry or stage in the process.
This allows the bank to establish relevance before an immediate product need exists and remain present as the owner’s plans evolve.
Turn retention intelligence into acquisition
The same audience strategy used to protect existing relationships can also help banks identify new ones. Once marketers understand the characteristics of clients most likely to experience succession, they can use those insights to develop look-alike audiences of businesses that bank elsewhere. The big difference is that now the campaign is reaching out to business owners who are not current customers, so the message must reflect the lack of relationship.
LinkedIn campaigns can reach owners, presidents, CEOs and other senior decision-makers within selected industries and geographies. Paid search can capture businesses researching succession planning, valuation, selling a business or acquisition financing. A consultative messaging platform can connect in the moment when an owner may be reconsidering financing, liquidity and advisory relationships. This type of proactive campaign can give a bank an opportunity to establish its value while the incumbent relationship is potentially vulnerable.
Market across the entire succession journey
Succession isn’t a single transaction. It’s a series of financial moments, each creating different audiences and opportunities. Before the transition, marketing can engage the current owner around planning, valuation and preparation. As a transaction approaches, communications can shift toward acquisition financing, treasury services and liquidity management. The opportunity continues after ownership changes.
A seller who spent decades with much of their net worth tied to the company may suddenly need wealth management, retirement planning or other advisory services. The new owner may need working capital, equipment financing, treasury management or additional capital to execute a growth strategy.
Marketing teams can map these different journeys in advance and create distinct nurture strategies for owners, sellers and buyers. Doing so can help the institution protect the original relationship while uncovering opportunities to expand it.
A single succession event could ultimately create several relationships: the former owner’s personal financial relationship, the commercial relationship with the new owner and potentially additional relationships with buyers, employees or other businesses involved in the transaction.
Measure business growth, not just engagement
Because succession marketing is intended to influence financial relationships, its success should extend beyond traditional campaign metrics. Email opens, landing-page visits, webinar registrations and content downloads remain useful measures of engagement, but they don’t tell the entire story.
Marketing teams should also connect their efforts to outcomes such as meetings generated with business owners, transition-related financing inquiries, acquisition loans booked, deposits retained following ownership changes, wealth management introductions and net-new commercial relationships.
Get ahead of the transition
Business succession is already reshaping the commercial markets banks serve. The opportunity for marketers is to identify where that change is likely to happen before it becomes visible to everyone else. Succession presents a unique opportunity to use one underlying strategy to address two critical growth priorities: protecting valuable relationships already on the books and finding the next ones.
Succession may be inevitable, but which bank captures the next relationship is still very much up for grabs.
Erinn Steffen is COO at Mower, an independent marketing, advertising and public relations agency.
