The 2021 Banker’s Gift Guide

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, we can turn our attention to the holidays. That means our annual gift guide for bankers. The Gift Guide (HERE) is not only fun to produce, but it is one of the pieces of content that generates the heaviest traffic. At this time, everyone is looking for gift ideas, and these are our best ideas – most of which we have rigorously tested. We also highlight this gift guide not only for your use but for your bank to use with your customers. If you are still looking a gift horse in the mouth, read on as there is more evidence to support this claim.

The Data Behind Gift Guides

Please don’t take my word for it; consider the multiple other outlets that will produce a gift guide every year. While many do so to generate profit through sales (There are no affiliate links in this Guide as it creates a conflict), most publications do it because it is a consistent traffic generator, not to mention a crowd-pleaser.

 Across the internet, gift guides get open approximately 45% of the time. This one is closer to 38%, but that is still significantly above the average 19% average level for most bank content. Inc. magazine, for example, does a gift guide every year, and it ranks in the top six sources of traffic.

 A gift guide is fantastic to help with organic search, and it has gotten stronger with more online shopping. Modern Retail reports an almost 7x increase in traffic for some brands in the pandemic and post-pandemic era compared with before. Focusing on particular keywords combined with the links combined with the clicks helps boost traffic.

Putting This Into Action

It is hard to tickle the cockles of a banker’s heart with a holiday gift mostly because most bankers don’t know where the cockles of their heart are. That doesn’t matter because what does matter is that with about 20 minutes' worth of work, you can take this template and customize it with your logo and ideas. You can even provide the template to your commercial customers so they can use it for their customers. Wow – that’s meta. It is the gift guide that can keep on giving.

Since bankers are more challenging to buy for than Kim Kardashian on Mother’s Day, we have painstakingly put together our best ideas that cover a diverse range of prices and lifestyles (although we skew towards tech, clothing, and food).

However, this template can be further customized with gifts that can tackle a particular audience. For example, if your goal was to drive more retail banking traffic, increasing gifts targeted at runners, fishing, fitness, our outdoor sports, in general, will statistically drive that traffic. In contrast, gifts around travel, luxury goods, sports, and experiences tend to drive commercial traffic.

December is a horrible time to do any bank digital marketing. It's expensive, competitive, and has the lowest effectiveness of any month. That said, this gift guide will not only inspire you to get in the holiday spirit but will help your bank successfully buck the traditional “no bank advertising” syndrome for the last two months of the year.

Here is the 2021 Banker’s Gift Guide in pdf form HERE.

If you want more information on how to reproduce this for your clients quickly, contact us, and we can get your marketing group a template or help put your logo and other customized gifts into the format.

The Gift Guide is excellent for also generating social media traffic (more ideas HERE). If you use the Guide on your website in a slideshow format, you can dramatically increase page views, time-on-page, and clicks – all of which help search engine optimization.

Hopefully, you will have the happiest and healthiest of holidays and take joy in being together with the family.

In case I don’t speak with you before the holidays, I want to wish you and yours the happiest and safest of holidays and a very Merry Christmas.