The main decision that needs to be made is how to split this budget between offline and online advertising. Within online advertising, BBVA must decide which portion of the budget to allocate to paid searches and which portion to display ads. If we were responsible for solving the problem, we would keep the ratio the same between online and offline advertising.
Currently online advertising is 21% of the marketing budget but is only responsible for 5% of new customers. BVAA has believed in the past that this was worth investing in for future growth. We are also of the opinion that future growth will come through the online channel and that we should continue to invest in this. We also think that it is possible that customers may see the online advertising but decide to open the account in a branch because of online security concerns or a desire to visit a branch. We do not have metrics to gauge this but our suggestion would be to implement a tracking system where the bank records where customers heard about BVAA for all new accounts. This would allow us to better track the effectiveness going forward. Another reason that we do not believe in reducing the online advertising budget is that the customer lifetime value is positive $619 ($634 for paid search and $604 for display advertising) for new customers acquired online. A comparative analysis is attached in annexure as Table 1.
Within online advertising, BBVA uses two methods to acquire customers online: paid search and display advertising. They currently allocate the online advertising by using 55% of the budget for display ads and 45% for paid search ads, and they accompany these with a promotional offer.
With the first method, BBVA buys keywords from search engines such as ‘free checking account’
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