Plenty of banks say they have a niche. "We do small business." "We love our farmers." Most of those aren't niches — they're brochure copy. A real niche is specific enough to build a program around, and the difference shows up in the results. This week on The Bank Marketing Show, we interviewed Tammy O'Shea, CMO of Fidelity Bank, a $1B bank headquartered in New Orleans, about their niche program, P.O.W.E.R., for woman-owned, for-profit businesses. We're sharing a few key lessons here. Three tests to run on any marketing idea? 1. Keep asking "who is this for, specifically?" until it hurts. "Small business" is too big to be a niche. What kind of small business? What area? What do the businesses have in common, specifically? Think more in terms of shared goals: women-owned businesses, nonprofits, ag operators of a specific crop or county. Each time you narrow, ask again. The specificity is what lets you build a real niche marketing engine, which is something memorable instead of a tagline. 2. Check your portfolio and your market — both have to say yes. Tammy O'Shea's rule: zero plus zero equals zero. The segment has to be big enough in your market to matter, and you need evidence you can actually win it. Think about loans you've already made, customers who already trust you, something you're already good at. Don't invent a niche out of thin air. Pull your last 20 commercial loans and look for the cluster. 3. Ask what you'd build for the niche, beyond the checking account. This is the test most banks fail. If the whole plan is a special account and some social posts, it's a product, not a niche. P.O.W.E.R. customers get a special purple debit card - but that's a perk, not the value of the program. The value of P.O.W.E.R. is the 3,000-member community, the private Facebook group where members refer each other business, and the education program members pay their own money to attend. If you can't describe what you'd build around the segment like events, community, knowledge, a dedicated person who owns it, then keep thinking. Pass all three and you have something worth taking to your board. It took Tammy a year to get hers approved. But nine years later, the board members are some of the program's biggest advocates!
