If your 2025 marketing plan looked a lot like your 2019 plan with TikTok sprinkled on top . . . this one’s for you.
Most credit union marketers I talk to are smart, overworked, and stuck in a weird reality:
- Your members live in a fully digital, on-demand world.
- Your exec team still loves billboards by the highway and the local business journal.
- Your budget has to “do everything,” and somehow still prove ROI.
As you head into 2026 planning, this is the perfect moment for a little radical honesty.
Here are five marketing resolutions I believe every credit union should make (and actually keep) in 2026. My challenge to you: Circle two and commit to them—for real.
Resolution #1: “We will stop funding anything we can’t track.”
Let’s start with the uncomfortable one.
If your CEO asks, “So what did that campaign actually do?” and your answer starts with, “Well, we got a lot of impressions…,” you already know where this is going.
I’m not saying everything has to tie back to a last-click conversion. Brand still matters. Top-of-funnel still matters. But in 2026, it’s no longer acceptable to:
- Run major campaigns with no clear conversion goal.
- Spend big on sponsorships and awareness buys that never get measured beyond “gut feel”.
- Accept reports that talk about only impressions and CPM without any connection to website traffic, started applications, account openings, or loan volume.
What this resolution actually looks like:
- Every campaign has a primary success metric: Future member reach, funded loans, new checking accounts, booked appointments, funded credit cards, app downloads, etc.
- Every channel gets at least one measurable action: landing page visits, QR scans, “Book an appointment” clicks, online applications started.
- Every vendor is held to a higher bar: “Show me how your reporting connects to our digital analytics and our growth goals.”
If you can’t explain how a tactic is measured and how that measurement connects back to growth, it’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. And nice-to-haves should not be eating your budget.
Resolution #2: “We will pick a real target market (and admit who we’re not for).”
One of the biggest marketing problems in our industry is the four-word phrase:
“Everyone in our community”
If your target market is “everyone,” your creative will be generic, your media will be wasteful, and your message will blend in with every other financial institution in town.
You already know this. But it’s hard to say out loud in a board meeting that you are not trying to reach everyone.
So in 2026, get specific—painfully specific—about who you’re trying to win.
Instead of “anyone in our field of membership,” try:
- “Young families in our footprint who rent today and want to buy their first home in the next 12–24 months.”
- “Healthcare and education employees age 25–45 within 25 miles of our branches.”
- “Self-employed professionals and small business owners with household income above $150K.”
Once you do that, your media and messaging decisions get much easier:
- Where does my audience actually spend their time?
- What are their pain points?
- What are the moments in their lives where your credit union can be genuinely helpful?
You’ll say “no” to more things. That’s a feature, not a bug, and it means you’re on the right track.
Resolution #3: “We will go where Gen Z actually is, not where our board feels comfortable.”
There’s a massive disconnect I see all the time:
- Gen Z and younger millennials are living on streaming TV, social, creators, and their phones.
- Boards and leadership teams are still instinctively thinking . . . community event sponsorships, newspaper, radio, billboards, and maybe a little Facebook.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if your growth strategy depends on younger members, but your media plan is built for their parents, you’re already behind.
Going where Gen Z actually is does not mean you have to chase every new platform or meme. It does mean you should:
- Show up consistently on high-attention, high-trust channels they actually see—like streaming TV and authentic social content.
- Design your campaigns for mobile-first consumption. If your ad doesn’t make sense on a phone with the sound off, start over.
- Think about moments, not just demographics: starting that first job, buying the first car, moving out, paying off student loans.
And yes, that sometimes means your board members won’t personally see the campaign you’re most excited about. (this is a BIG one)
That doesn’t mean it’s the wrong campaign. It probably means it’s finally the right one.
Resolution #4: “We will prioritize high-trust channels over the cheapest CPMs.”
Let’s talk about the addiction to “cheap.”
Cheap CPMs feel good in a spreadsheet. You get a huge number of impressions for not a lot of budget, and it looks impressive in a dashboard.
But here’s the question: do your members actually see and trust those impressions?
An impression on a cluttered website, below the fold, competing with five other flashing banners . . . is not the same as an impression on a 65-inch TV in the living room during a show they actually chose to watch.
A pre-roll spot on a sketchy site is not the same as a 30-second ad in premium streaming TV content.
In 2026, I’d love to see more credit unions resolve to optimize for impact, not just cost:
- Be willing to pay more for fewer, higher-quality impressions in channels members actually notice and trust.
- Look for frequency and consistency with the right audience instead of maximum reach with anyone who will take your ad dollars.
- Use broad-reach, low-trust channels for testing and retargeting, not as the foundation of your brand.
This is one of the reasons so many CUs are finally getting serious about streaming TV: it combines the credibility of “being on TV” with the targeting and measurement that leadership now expects.
The question for 2026 isn’t “How cheap can we buy media?” It’s “Where can we buy trust and attention with the people we most want to serve?”
Resolution #5: “We will treat marketing as a growth engine, not just an expense line.”
This is the mindset shift that unlocks everything else.
When marketing is seen as a cost, planning conversations sound like this:
- “What can we cut?”
- “Can we do the same as last year for 10% less?”
- “We just need a little ‘brand awareness’ and some auto loan campaigns.”
When marketing is seen as a growth engine, the questions change:
- “What growth can we reasonably expect from a $X investment in this channel?”
- “What member segments can we reach and serve more deeply next year?”
- “How do we use marketing to support our strategic initiatives: deposits, loans, digital adoption, membership growth?”
In practical terms, this resolution might mean:
- Building a simple marketing scorecard that connects campaigns to real business outcomes (loans, accounts, balances, digital usage).
- Bringing finance and marketing closer together so you can talk ROI in the same language.
- Being brave enough to say, “If we want that level of growth, we can’t get there on this budget—and here’s the math to prove it.”
Your board doesn’t wake up excited about GRPs, CTRs, or CPMs. They wake up caring about growth, risk, and sustainability.
Marketing is one of the most powerful levers you have for growth. 2026 is the year to start treating it that way.
How to actually keep these resolutions
Resolutions are easy to make and easy to forget by February.
Here’s how you give these five a fighting chance:
- Print them and bring them into your next planning meeting. Literally. Put them on the table.
- Circle two you’re willing to own in 2026. Not all five. Start with two and do them well.
- Translate each into 2–3 concrete actions.
- Resolution #1 (measurement) might become: “Every campaign must have a defined success metric and a post-campaign performance review.”
- Resolution #3 (go where Gen Z is) might become: “We will shift X% of our budget into channels where age 18–34 is actually over-indexed.”
- Share them with your CEO and team. Say, “These are the promises we’re making to ourselves and to the organization this year.”
If you keep even two of these resolutions, your 2026 marketing will look—and perform—very differently from 2025.
And if you want a brutally honest outside perspective on which tactics to cut, which to test, and how streaming TV can fit into a smarter media mix, I’m always happy to talk shop.
Here’s to making 2026 the year your marketing stops apologizing for its budget . . . and starts confidently owning its impact.
