How do you drive traffic to your bank? It’s a basic question, but the answers can be just about anything under the sun.
When you look at your bank branches, check to see where the variations in profit levels are. Certain locations might excel while others just recoup their costs or even skew negative. And oftentimes, branches with lower profits also have fewer visitors to their lobby.
Does this ring true for you? For branches that are stuck at their performance level or declining, what can be done?
Co-Branding: A Different Type of Shared Space
For underperforming branches, reaching new customers is an essential – and oftentimes difficult – task to accomplish. As a national average, lobby transactions are down, but that doesn’t mean your branch has to become a downward-trending statistic.
But how? Knowing all this, what steps can you take to increase traffic to your financial institution? In my experience, one of the more effective and efficient ways to drive foot traffic into your bank lobby is by co-branding.
Create a Banking Experience
Co-branding makes it possible for banks to share a space with other businesses so they can benefit each other and create brand awareness for visitors. The most popular model of co-branding is combining a financial institution and a coffee shop.
Because the bank and the coffee shop would share a space and have the same entrance, there’s a crossover of foot traffic. Visitors to the coffee shop gain awareness of the bank, and bank visitors can get a coffee. It’s a modern and innovative way to draw non-customer traffic into your lobby and begin building a relationship with visitors who might one day become customers.
In our experience, retail businesses like coffee shops or cell phone carriers make for great co-branding results, but those aren’t the only business types this works with. Successful co-branding can also include partnerships with investors, insurance companies, accountants, attorneys and title companies.
Mutual Benefits for Businesses
Beyond increasing foot traffic and opportunities to increase brand awareness, deciding your branch or financial institution is going to co-brand has additional benefits. For one, sharing a single space decreases overhead expenses. It’s just like back in college when you had roommates, and everyone had their percentage of the bill... except it’s not just like college because you’re splitting the bill with responsible adults who are business owners and pillars within the community. Still, only having to pay half or a third of your current overhead expenses makes a big difference, especially when you look at how it impacts your budget on a yearly basis.
And while cost savings and convenience are great, the best benefit of banks and credit unions sharing their space with other businesses is also the biggest: Getting more people in the door and making relationship building possible.
Can Two Businesses Share the Same Address?
This question, along with the tens or maybe hundreds of other questions you may have about co-branding or creating a full brand experience for visitors are precisely the questions we’re here to answer.
Figuring out how to structure multiple businesses under one roof seems complicated when you first think about it, but that’s the value in partnering with an architecture firm that’s experienced in what you’re looking to accomplish.
Know that you can contact us about an upcoming project or get in touch with one of our financial experts to talk with someone one-on-one about your upcoming project.
