April 3, 2026

A Cleaner Way to Budget for Bank Marketing

I'm addressing a slightly different topic this week due to a question I run into regularly. It's a simple question with surprisingly big implications:

How much should you invest in marketing?

There are a lot of ways to answer it.

Some institutions look at asset size.

Some try to benchmark against peers.

Some lump marketing into a broader expense bucket and hope for the best.

But the cleaner metric may be this:

A community bank should consider investing roughly 4–5% of net income annually in outside marketing.

Why net income?

Because it ties marketing investment to actual performance, not just scale.

A $500MM bank and a $5B bank may have very different structures, staffing models, and branch footprints, but net income gives leadership a more grounded way to determine what the institution can responsibly invest to drive growth.

It also helps separate internal overhead from external growth activity.

Too often, banks assume they are “spending on marketing” because they have internal staff, a website vendor, a few sponsorships, and some social posts going out. But that is not the same as having a true growth program in market.

While internal teams are important, they don’t typically have the bench strength of specialists in:

strategy
audience targeting
media deployment
creative optimization
data analysis
campaign measurement

And frankly, they should not have to.

Banks are experts in banking.

They should expect their marketing partners to be experts in growth.

That is part of why we built T3.

T3 helps community banks put targeted, tailored, and turnkey deposit growth programs into market without forcing internal teams to become media buyers, data analysts, strategists, and campaign managers all at once.

If your bank is profitable, but your outside marketing investment is inconsistent, reactive, or simply too low to produce real growth, it may be time to rethink the formula.

4–5% of net income is not just a budgeting thought exercise. It may be the difference between doing marketing and growth through marketing.

If you are thinking about growth this year and not just checking a box, it’s time we connected.