Blogs are common on bank websites these days, but keeping them populated with engaging content can be a challenge. Grand Savings Bank, which is headquartered in Grove, Oklahoma, and has 15 locations in Oklahoma and Arkansas, has succeeded with a distinct formula. The $1 billion-asset bank’s blog, which launched in 2017, contains a mix of posts offering useful financial information, community spotlights, staff profiles and bank history.
“We just feel like our blog is a great avenue to disperse good information,” says Guy Cable, CEO of Grand Savings Bank. “We don’t want it to just pepper people with financial products constantly. We’re in a fast-growing community, and we really [want] people to know who we are, what our corporate culture is.”
He notes that Grand Savings Bank’s blog doesn’t exist simply so the bank can check a box. There is a commitment from the top down to make it useful and community focused.
“Our concept is we want tangible, usable information that can benefit our clients,” Cable says. “We don’t want to put anything in there that’s just fluff just so we can say we have a blog.”
Bank Blog Content Strategy and Creation Process
The community bank publishes blog posts approximately once per month, though they’ll post more frequently if it makes sense. They lean on a local marketing agency for help with the writing and optimization of the blog.
Dale Ford, executive vice president of retail operations for Grand Savings Bank, says the team creates a marketing calendar each year based on month designations, such as National Credit Education Month in March or Cybersecurity Awareness Month in October.
If they decide to write about a specific monthly theme—for example, a post from March was titled “What is credit and why does it matter?”—the marketing agency creates a post that is not necessarily specific to Grand Savings Bank. The post is then reviewed by the bank’s compliance department before going live.
More tailored articles are interspersed with general topics, such as profiles of the communities they serve or news about bank employees. The local information originates from the community bank’s market presidents.
“Grand Savings Bank is really unique in every market we’re in, and our market presidents are the face of the community,” says Ford. “We rely on our team members to provide the information about the community, and we get that over to our marketing agency, and they write the blog and send it back to the bank for review.”
The community-focused blog posts are popular, Ford notes. For example, a series of posts in 2021 and 2022 called “Get to know our Grand communities” showcased nine of the areas the bank serves. These posts were intended to capture the spirit of those communities and offer useful information.
Measuring Community Bank Marketing Impact
Cable notes that the posts that generate the most interest are about employees. A blog post from September 2025 was a Q&A with Diana Kinyon, the community bank’s mortgage loan manager, and Fernando Mendez, one of the bank’s mortgage lenders. A month prior, Grand Savings Bank blogged about Mark Buergler, a new market president.
“Our customers love it when we highlight our employees; they love to hear their stories,” says Cable. “In a community bank, what’s important is the people within the bank. It’s not our buildings or anything else. So those posts make a connection to people they know.”
Naturally, Grand Savings Bank also uses its blog to tout its products. An article last December highlighted the Grand Mobile Wallet, the bank’s digital wallet, and its practical uses for holiday shopping. A post from November 2025 discussed a new texting functionality that allows customers to securely chat with a customer care representative.
Measuring marketing’s impact
When a new blog post is published, Grand Savings Bank highlights it in its monthly email to customers. It also links to the blog on its social media, which leads to further traffic as employees spread the word.
“Our employees are really engaged with sharing our information on their platforms,” says Ford. “Their likes and shares really make an impact.”
Ford points to the community bank’s web analytics as evidence of the blog’s success. “Every month, the landing pages of the blog are consistently in the top 10 pages customers visit [on our website],” he says. “There’s a lot of activity there.”
Those numbers are encouraging, but Cable also gets a sense that the blog is working as intended because of face-to-face reactions from customers.
“We do get a lot of people saying that they like what we’re doing,” he says. “They see our name; they see our efforts on these platforms.”