How We Grew Checking Accounts 40% YOY at M&T Bank
- Matt Adams
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
The Problem
When I joined M&T Bank's small business marketing team, we had a growth problem — and not the fun kind.
New checking account acquisition was lagging behind competitors. The content we were putting out was mostly white-labeled, recycled across business lines, and not tied to any real understanding of what our customers actually needed. Executive leadership wanted a new engagement model for the small-to-medium business vertical. We had appetite and runway. What we needed was a strategy.
So before we built anything, we went to find out what we were actually dealing with.
The Process
Starting with research, not assumptions
We interviewed customers and internal stakeholders, audited the competitive landscape, and looked hard at where M&T had a genuine right to win. That research shaped everything that followed — including [how we defined our brand promise to small business owners] and [the four jobs-to-be-done we built our strategy around].
One thing that became clear fast: our content wasn't working because it wasn't ours. It lived on a siloed blog site, off our primary domain, with no metadata structure for search. Competitors — especially Square — had content hubs that were organized, discoverable, and actually felt worth reading.
Building something worth finding
We made the case for a smarter tech stack and got to work building an SEO-enhanced content hub on the main domain. We organized topics around eight themes our research told us mattered most to aspiring and early-stage business owners — things like writing a business plan, raising capital, managing cash flow, and fraud prevention.
Rather than flood it with new content immediately, we seeded it with white-labeled material first to see what organic traffic would tell us. It told us a lot: visitors were spending the most time on Planning and Funding a Business content.
Testing before doubling down
Armed with that signal, we built owned short-form assets around those two themes and put paid support behind them — Google Discovery, social, and native placements — to drive additional traffic. Separately, we ran an A/B test on our checking account landing pages, adding both Tailored and Simple Checking options to a single page rather than routing users based on which product they'd seen in an ad. The theory was that giving prospects a sense of choice would increase conversions.
It did. The dual landing page drove a 53% increase in conversion rate in the first quarter.
The Results
In the final months of the program:
87,000 unique visitors to the content hub
23 appointments scheduled directly attributed to content
>2 minutes average time on page
40% YOY growth in new checking accounts
20% reduction in cost per acquisition
What I Learned
The biggest unlock wasn't a campaign tactic or a landing page test — it was the decision to do the research first. Every meaningful result in this program traced back to something a customer told us in an interview or something the data surfaced early that we were willing to actually act on.
The other thing: acquisition and content are not separate strategies. The content hub wasn't a brand play. It was the top of an acquisition funnel that we deliberately connected all the way through to account opening and onboarding.
Working on a customer acquisition or content strategy challenge? Get in touch — I'd love to hear what you're building.
Related posts:
Comments