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I recently sat down with Mandy Bradshaw, Content Marketing Specialist at First Bank of the Lake, for an episode of Bound by Banking. Mandy has spent over 15 years in the digital marketing trenches and many of those years have been for financial institutions. Her perspective is the kind only someone who’s actually run the campaigns can offer. We covered the realities of paid acquisition, where banks tend to trip themselves up, and what “staying competitive” actually means for a community bank in 2026.
Below are the threads from our conversation I think every bank marketing leader and executive should sit with. This is advice from someone who has spent years running campaigns day in and day out. It’s worth taking seriously.
One of my favorite framings from our conversation came when Mandy was talking about Google Ads, specifically, what new campaigns actually look like in their first 90 days.
She walked through the progression. When a campaign launches, the early data is impressions. That’s it. You want to see them growing, and that growth is your first signal of life. But it’s not where you stay. Around month two, Google starts learning who’s actually clicking. Then it starts learning who’s converting. And as that learning kicks in, your impressions often dip, which sounds bad but is actually the system getting better at serving your ads to the right people, not just any people.
“Google and you are dating,” she said. “You have to get to know each other.”
That reframe matters because too many institutions kill campaigns at month one when the numbers look soft. They’re not soft — they’re learning. Mandy put it perfectly: you’re not spending money in the first 30-60 days, you’re investing in your data. The institutions willing to ride out the dating phase are the ones who end up with the kind of high-intent lead flow that actually moves their growth numbers.
I asked Mandy where banks tend to overcomplicate marketing and where they oversimplify it. She had clean answers for both.
The overcomplication is a perfection problem. Banks try to make every campaign perfect before it goes live. Every ad gets routed through layers of stakeholders. Every word gets polished. And in the meantime, the campaign that could be running, learning, and generating data sits in a Slack thread. Mandy was clear that compliance matters and the bank’s voice has to be protected, but you don’t need approval from the CEO to the groundskeeper before you push a button. You go with what you think will work, you put it in front of an audience, and you let the audience tell you. A/B testing is how you find out what works. As Mandy said, “nothing is failing, you’re just learning.”
The oversimplification is a silo problem. A lot of banks treat marketing like it lives in a vacuum. Leads get generated, handed to sales, and then disappear into a black hole. Did they close? Were they a good fit? Did customer care field the calls? Without that feedback loop, the marketing team is flying blind, and worse, the data never makes it back into the ad platforms to improve targeting. Mandy’s point: marketing performs better when it’s collaborative. A solid CRM, clean lead handoff, and shared visibility across teams is what turns campaigns from one-off pushes into a closed-loop growth engine.
The last thing I asked Mandy was what “staying competitive” actually looks like for a community bank in 2026. Her answer surprised me with how practical it was.
It starts with online account opening. There are still banks today that don’t offer it because, in their words, “people will just come down to the branch.” Mandy’s response was sharp: yes, your existing customer base might do that. But the next generation of customers, like the people working 9-to-5, parents trying to open a new account late at night, or really anyone under 35… those people are not driving to a branch. They want to open an account in their pajamas. If you don’t let them, your competitor will.
Her smart tip on this front: when you’re shopping for an online account opening platform, ask whether the vendor lets you watch how applicants move through the flow. Not their personal info, just their journey. Where do they drop off? Which step is causing friction? That visibility, layered onto your marketing data, is where exponential improvement comes from.
But digital tools alone aren’t a strategy. Once you’ve made it easy to do business with you, the next move is becoming known for something. Pick the product you want to win in. Build content around it, an develop subject matter experts. Stop trying to be everything to everyone, because you can’t, and trying is exactly what makes most community banks blur into one another.
Mandy’s conversation maps almost perfectly to the work we do at Bankbound. The dating phase is real. The silos are real. And the institutions willing to invest in clean infrastructure like paid acquisition that’s allowed to learn, online account opening that actually converts, and cross-team data flow that closes the loop are the ones who win the next decade.
If you lead growth or marketing at a community bank or credit union and want a partner who knows what it takes to run this play, reach out to our team. We’ve worked with more than 100 institutions, and we’ll help you separate the signal from the noise.
Big thanks to Mandy for the conversation and the wisdom. Her practical, in-the-trenches perspective is the kind every bank marketing team needs more of.
