How Citizens Bank transformed content to meet changing customer needs

Citizens Bank is a regional business with approximately 1,200 branches in major northeast markets. To build trust and authority with customers they transformed their content strategy, broke ground on new channels like TikTok and backed everything with data.

Meeting customers where they are and supporting ‘feet on the street’

Lori Dillion serves as head of enterprise marketing at Citizens Bank, with 30 years of experience at the company. In that time, she’s seen a great deal of change in how customers do their banking, in corporate and personal accounts.

Yes, the pandemic accelerated users’ digital-first behavior, but that shift was already well underway prior to lockdowns.

Dillon discussed the new sales and marketing approach. “On the commercial side, if you were to think back five years ago, their whole model is establishing their front line — establishing a relationship with a CFO and CEO,” Dillon said. “I call this ‘feet on the street,’ and it’s still extremely important. But when you look at the change in digital and who those CFOs and CEOs are today, they’re younger and they use mobile a lot.”

Mobile marketing through app and web experiences has replaced a lot of cold calling in Citizens Bank’s B2B strategy. There are still sales agents, or “feet on the street,” speaking directly to decision makers, but now they have much more data to inform these conversations.

“Now, we’re leveraging marketing to reach CFOs and CEOs in the way that they interact in their everyday [behaviors],” said Dillon. “We’re not selling products with digital ads, we’re selling a lot of insight and advice so that when that front-line agent calls or meets with them, they’re like ‘oh, you’re from Citizens.’”

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Ramping up content over ads

“What’s accelerated is customers’ expectations of brands,” said Dillon. “We’re sending them more good insights and information and what we call ‘content’ instead of sending them an ad about a specific product.”

Long before customers hear from a sales agent to set up a meeting about products, they are reading content from the bank about financial news and trends that mean the most to them.

Citizens Bank implemented a data intelligence platform (DIP) to gain insights from customer behavior, as well as general industry trends, so that the business can serve the right content to the right customer. The bank also has a digital asset management tool (DAM) to organize and update many different content categories.

“We have to think about our budget — around being in all different channels, and doing a lot more than just offering a product,” said Dillon.

For executives, Citizens Bank might send them content written by an economist about an upcoming recession, or other market trends. Consumers will receive more personalized content based on their life stage — how to manage and pay off credit card debt, for instance, or how to save up for a child’s college education.

Because this content is targeted, there is a lot more of it, which makes having a DAM system crucial.

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Testing and learning on TikTok

Not only does Citizens Bank have to maintain a presence on many digital channels, but they have to evaluate new channels as they emerge. And these channels can come from unlikely origins.

During pandemic lockdowns in 2020, Dillon heard about TikTok from her daughter, who was 13 at the time. A year later, Dillon informed her wary marketing team that she thought Citizens Bank should be on the platform.

“I told them I thought the trend was changing,” Dillon said. “It wasn’t just for 12- and 13-year-olds any more. And sure enough, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine happened [in 2022], the number one way that people ages 15 to 28 got their information about the war was on TikTok. So now TikTok became the place where slightly older people were getting information. I won’t get into the issue of false news, but they were getting information in a much different way.”

This older consumer (by TikTok standards) was in-market for personal banking, so Dillon broke ground for the brand by launching a TikTok campaign to promote the bank’s mobile app.

Citizens Bank teamed up with Derek Hough (of “Dancing with the Stars” fame) to create the #DitchYourWalletDuet challenge. The message was that bank customers didn’t need their physical wallets anymore because they could do banking digitally through their phones.

The campaign kicked off with a choreographed video featuring Derek Hough, who tosses his wallet off-camera before completing a fun dance routine. Other TikTok users then posted their own videos, editing themselves next to Hough while they performed dance duets. Since launching in late 2021, #DitchYourWalletDuet has garnered 12.9 million views.

“We continue to engage on the TikTok in meaningful ways guided by data, and take a test-and-learn approach,” said Dillon.