3 best practices for using digital marketing to promote your card program

Almost half of credit users will use the same card for most purchases according to the Financial Brand. By taking advantage of digital marketing opportunities, you can help ensure your credit union’s card becomes members’ preferred all-purpose card. Digital marketing can help you make the best use of your marketing budget by directly targeting your audience with messaging that speaks to their needs and wants. This requires knowing how to find your audience, creating relevant content, and understanding digital data.

1. Know How to Find Your Target Audience

Like all marketing, a strong digital marketing campaign begins with having a clearly defined target audience and goals for each interaction.  Find out where your target audience hangs out online and share you messaging on these platforms. Bring digital marketing into the real world by optimizing your site and ads for mobile and listing keywords in location-based directories like FourSquare or Google Places. This can help attract locals searching on smartphones. 

Texting, social and email are also great two-way communication options. According to a survey by Adobe, younger groups like Millennials are major users of emails, so this would be a good way to connect with them.

2. Create Relevant Content 

Relevant content not only improves search engine ranking, but it also keeps your audience engaged and responsive to your marketing efforts. Offer current users tips for using card services or address concerns non-users may have about credit. Try visiting blogs and forums to see what questions are being asked or review the “Related Questions” in Google search results and answer them. 

3. Understand the Digital Data 

This is a great way to better understand your audience. Get the help of a site tracking service like Google Analytics to understand where your visitors are going on your website and pay attention to the metrics on your social media accounts and emails. What is getting the most engagement? What links are being clicked and which emails are your audience opening? Review keywords you plan to highlight on your blogs and web pages on Google Trends and Wordtracker to gain insights. These can include search volumes along with seasonal and regional popularity that will enhance content strategy planning. 

By using data to better understand your audience, you will be in a good position to create relevant content and keywords that draw in new potential users and engage current cardholders. While sifting through the data and different platforms takes effort, digital marketing is a powerful tool that can enhance a well-developed portfolio. It helps credit unions highlight a card program’s benefits to the most receptive audiences available. To learn about opportunities for enhancing your credit union’s credit portfolio and marketing goals, click here.