River City Bank: commitment to sales lifecycle ensures discipline, focus for repositioning campaign.

When Wendy Duer, senior vice president and director of marketing for River City Bank, Sacramento, Calif., was faced with the challenge of repositioning the bank, she and her team explored marketing and media they had not used before. But even as they implemented cutting-edge tactics, they never strayed from the tried and true--a commitment to a well-disciplined sales lifecycle.

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For the bank, which currently lists 13 branches and assets of more than $1 billion, the strategic shift from full-service retail to a goal of becoming the region's premier business bank marked a sea change. In response, marketing resources were refocused on sales to business owners and those of high net worth.

Research indicated that many businesses were fairly satisfied with their smaller banks, so the opportunity seemed to be in competing with the larger players in the market. According to Duer, "We discovered that business owners we targeted would talk with us and listen to what we had to say, but that they were much more likely to welcome the call if they knew who we were first," she says. The question became how to turn cold calls into "warm" calls.

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Duer's solution was to introduce the rebranded bank to the business community, starting with the launch of a 360-degree marketing campaign that included direct mail, print, radio, outdoor, quarterly CEO events and forums, and social media--including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Many of River City's ad executions featured The New Yorker magazine cartoons poking fun at traditional big banks and combined with consistent messaging to reinforce the bank's new brand: "Not bigger. Better for your business."

"We wanted to let the community know that we're large enough to compete with the big banks but not so big that our customers would be lost," she says. "We wanted to be top of mind with our existing customers but also with those who might want to switch banks."

Duer's team then followed the ads with a series of mailings--to 100 prospects each week--of personalized "sales tins" that included a message from the CEO, handwritten notecards from the assigned relationship manager, a USB stick with links to the bank website and a calendar featuring...