What makes credit unions great? Maybe it’s their low fees, the flexible underwriting standards, or their great customer service. Your current customers know this; now it’s time to attract new members. There’s no better way to market your credit union than with digital marketing.
It’s hard to ignore digital marketing’s place in today’s marketing strategies. People look for everything online, including money management tools. If you’re not there, they will find your competitors.
But what does a digital marketing strategy look like today? You’ve been sending emails to your customers. You’ve dabbled with Facebook ads. Is there really more to it?
There is. A recent poll showed that 57 percent of banks and only 23 percent of credit unions use search engine marketing. That means fewer than one in four credit unions is doing anything to be where prospects are looking online.
Want new members? Saying “yes” to a digital marketing strategy is a step in the right direction.
How Digital Marketing Works
Digital marketing involves many of the same principles utilized in traditional marketing. It promotes products and services through a variety of online channels, including websites, social media platforms, and email marketing.
However, digital marketing steps up traditional marketing in effectiveness. As a digital marketer, you’ll have access to a variety of tools and analytics to help you make instant decisions on direction. You can pivot quickly to get more out of every dollar you spend.
Yet having this speed also means more ads vying for your prospect’s attention. If you don’t stand out, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.
Digital marketing typically includes a combination of:
Website Marketing
Your website is the hub of your digital marketing strategy. It must be fast-loading, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows you to reach audiences on websites and digital platforms, including Google and Facebook. These campaigns can segment users based on demographics, characteristics, and location.
Content Marketing
Content allows you to connect with your prospects and members on a deeper level. You publish written, visual, or video content on your website and promote it through all other channels, including social media, email marketing, and pay-per-click campaigns.
Email Marketing
Email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience. When done right, you can gather email addresses from various sources and use them to add new customers and sell additional services to existing members.
Social Media Marketing
Credit unions can use social media marketing campaigns to build brand awareness and establish trust. As you continue to build and grow, your social media profiles will attract prospects and give them reasons to share your content.
Local SEO Marketing
Local SEO marketing focuses on optimizing a business’s online presence to attract more customers from relevant local searches. It’s essential for credit unions that operate in a specific geographical area or have a physical location where customers visit.
Why You Should Be Considering Digital Marketing for Your Credit Union
Why digital marketing? Because it helps you reach a larger audience than you ever could with more traditional methods. Plus, the speed makes it more cost-effective, allowing you to pivot and adjust every campaign based on real-time analytics.
We feel digital marketing is perfect for credit unions because:
You Can Focus on Only the Prospects Most Likely to Purchase
If you’ve ever placed a television or radio ad, you know you have limited control over the audience. With digital marketing, you can identify and target a highly specific audience, giving them personalized marketing messages that convert. You can track that conversion, testing and adjusting to make it even more profitable.
You Can Maximize Your Ad Spend
Digital marketing lets you track your daily ad spend on every campaign, watching what channels perform well and which don’t. You can pivot continuously, ensuring you build on the channels that are working well.
You Can Compete Even With the Biggest Competitors
Who are your local competitors? Where would you like more of your business to come from? It’s hard competing against the biggest names in your industry—the biggest names always have bigger bucks. But with digital marketing, you can compete with them, showing up where you’re most likely to target people who will do business with you.
You Can Measure Your Results
Have you ever dumped money into a marketing strategy where you weren’t sure how well it worked? That doesn’t happen with digital marketing. One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is that it can give you start-to-finish metrics you can use to see how well it works. With impressions, shares, views, and clicks, you’ll always know where traffic comes from and how it impacts your overall costs.
You Can Adapt and Change as You See Fit
A lot of effort goes into planning any campaign. Nothing is more frustrating than putting time and effort into something, and not seeing results. Yet marketing is marketing; things won’t always go according to plan. Being able to pivot and adjust easily means you can work at it until it gives you the desired results.
You Can Improve the Quality of Your Leads
Continuously refining your methods means you’ll learn more about your prospects and members. You’ll be able to pinpoint what motivates them and reach out to them on deeper levels. Studies show that 91 percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant content, and 80 percent are more likely to purchase when the brand offers personalized experiences. Digital marketing allows you to target specific audiences that will yield higher-quality leads that are more likely to become members.
Integrate Digital Marketing Into Your Credit Union Marketing Strategy
Connecting with your audience allows you to convert a lead into a credit union member. Digital marketing gives you so many opportunities to reach your prospective members through a wide variety of channels.
Whether it’s pay-per-click or content marketing, digital marketing is critical to building a stronger, more robust marketing system.
Need help? We’ve helped other credit unions succeed, and we’re ready and waiting for you.
