"I wanted to say that the brochures and the posters are a big hit. We have received many praises from clients and our management team."
Frank Tabar - SVP, Strategic Risk and Operating Officer
Farmers and Merchants Trust Company of Long Beach, CA
The inside story behind the success.
Leverage the bank branch traffic for trust and wealth management.
Announce Yourself
Trust and Wealth Management services don't represent the majority of revenue for the majority of banks, so their presence is often not emphasized throughout the bank's footprint.
Make every branch a trust branch.
That footprint can and should be leveraged for growth because people can't buy services if they don't know they exist.
Enter: Farmers and Merchants Trust Company
Farmers and Merchants Trust Company already knew this and were finding success with this strategy.
Frank Tabar had a fairly good idea of the return on investment with this strategy, given his experience with it and what the costs per piece needed to be to achieve a positive return.
Frank had previously utilized Schumaker's trust brochures, but Schumaker has since went out of business.
Enter: Merrill Anderson Co.
Merrill Anderson Co. can bring efficiency to trust and marketing teams by making it so they don't need to reinvent the wheel - lowering their costs while providing a premium product.
The initial solution was simple, reduce the cost by utilizing a couple of brochures from our library that also would take the mystery out of trusts and turn their suspects into prospects in a standard branded layout to reduce costs.
However, during our articulate and approve phase, we discovered that the costs would still be too high to justify given the distribution mechanism was self-qualified.
Our production team met and found ways to lower those costs such as:
Frank already had in-branch displays, so we would redesign our brochure templates to fit within them and design new posters to be their innards. We removed the binding (stapling) of the brochures and reformatted them into a parallel folded brochures with die-cuts for business card personalization rather than printed personalization. Still high but close, we increased the quantity to be for a multi-year purchase and had our editor go through to ensure they would not become dated. The prices in-line, the new proposal was approved.
They wanted us to handle the design and print production, so our design team crafted proofs of the posters and proofs of the brochures. We handled the production and drop-shipped to their distribution center. When we checked in later on to see how the folders had been received and working out - here's the response we received:
I wanted to say that the brochures and the posters are a big hit. We have received many praises from clients and our management team.
Frank Tabar
Senior Vice President
Strategic Risk and Operating Officer
Farmers and Merchants Trust Company of Long Beach
We went on the next year to create smaller displays for the branches that didn't have space for their pre-existing larger ones. We continue to provide Farmers and Merchants Trust Company with continuing marketing support and are proud to have seen them grow their team and add two more locations just for trust and wealth management! This year, we're planning to add titles and since the success of this strategy was greater than anticipated.
