‘It doesn’t look like a typical bank website, but invites visitors to stay longer and enjoy an improved website experience.’
By Craig Colgan
After two-plus years of designs and redesigns, OMB Bank’s new website was finally launched in 2022. The result for the Springfield, Missouri-based bank has been worth the wait. The updated site is graphically eye-grabbing, easy for consumers to navigate and engaging for visitors. Animated icons help the site come alive with movement. While these moments are subtle, they add movement and a vibe to what’s typically a static environment. CTA buttons are also animated as well as badges, adding an aesthetic that reinforces brand guidelines.
The 2022 ABA Brand Slam Award-winning site functions best for new visitors who may not be certain exactly what they need. These visitors are encouraged through call-to-action buttons which takes them through a short and very simple quiz. By answering some leading questions through a pathway of DDA or loan products, the end result is a product selection card specific to them. (The 2023 awards will be announced at the ABA Bank Marketing Conference, Sept. 27-29 in Austin.) Ryan Bowling, VP, director of marketing, answered our questions about the site:
In your entry information, you explained: “The website functions most impressively for new visitors who aren’t sure exactly what they need. These visitors are encouraged through call to action buttons to ‘GET STARTED,’ which takes them through a short and very simple quiz. By answering some leading questions through a pathway of DDA or loan products, the end result is a product selection card specific to them … “ How has that approached worked?
This approach has worked really well for us. In 2023 alone we’ve had more than 3,000 unique visitors move through it, leading to more than 800 conversions (all data as of July). It’s a great opportunity to capitalize on general brand advertising. When our intent is to simply get our name in front of consumers and invite them to take action, our Get Started flow quickly and efficiently matches them with a product or service that fits their immediate needs, even if they didn’t enter our website fully aware of what they were interested in. In this regard it has been a fantastic tool.
Your blog is very topical and filled with good ideas from our financial lives. Can you describe the role your blog is playing here? Where do you get your ideas? Do you share its content via social media as well, etc.?
Having a robust, topical and relevant blog is part of an intentional multi-pronged plan that fits into our overall content marketing strategy. The blog serves as an opportunity to promote financial literacy, which is important to us and our role within our communities. It’s also a very important part of our website SEO strategy. Not only are the individual blog pages and the content they contain relevant to consumers, but they’re loaded with optimized SEO title sources, description sources, keywords and LSI keywords. Once a visitor hits a blog page, we also optimize that page with internal links and opportunities to cross-promote products and services. Our website averages about two pages per session, meaning most visitors who come to our website visit a second page before leaving. Fairly often that’s a product page that’s been linked somewhere in a blog article.
What would you say is the main difference between the look of the new site compared to the previous site?
Our former website was a fairly typical bank website, so the main difference between it and our new site would be the addition of subtle movements, an expanded color palette and the use of modules to create unique but similar configurations across the site. Essentially, it doesn’t look like a typical bank website, but invites visitors to stay longer and enjoy an improved website experience.
Are customer-facing team members referring customers to the site? What do you hear internally about how your team members and customers feel about the site?
Yes, our customer-facing team members are absolutely referring customers to our website. All of our calling officers, from commercial lenders to mortgage officers, have individual pages unique to them on the site. Their pages contain everything from short bios to product cards and financial calculators relevant to what they do in particular. They are able to treat their page as their own microsite and referring a potential client or customer can provide all of the information they need to present them on a page that’s branded especially for our teammate.
Launching a website is not an easy task and credit for OMB’s in particular goes out to several people. It was the dream and vision of Chief Marketing Officer Shanda Trautman, who decided to team up with local web development company Mostly Serious. Together they put together a great visual board of what the website should become. Along the way we had several teammates come aboard, myself included, who helped to get this project across the finish line. Everyone on the team made invaluable contributions and created something that has ultimately made us very proud.
One other note: We (recently) moved our website domain from oldmissouribank.com to ombbank.com in conjunction with our name change to OMB Bank earlier this year.
