Your 5-step guide to marketing your credit union brand

Marketing your credit union brand sounds simple enough. And it is. But that’s the thing about simplicity: it’s rarely easy.

Here are just a few of the roadblocks we’ve seen in credit union marketing assessments when it comes to the challenge of tackling “simple” marketing principles:

There are good intentions behind each of these hurdles, but they nonetheless show that knowing you should do marketing doesn’t make marketing implementation any easier.

So, how do you make simple into easy? This five-step guide provides some quick, clear ways to improve your marketing implementation.

It’s hard to market easily without a clear idea of who you are speaking to with each piece of collateral. Take the up-front time to craft a “cheat sheet” of your target niches and their pain points. Then, use it anytime you make a marketing piece.

Your cheat sheet should include:

A helpful exercise to uncover your value is to list ten members you know well (preferably a few from each niche). List why they are a member. What value do you give them?

Lastly, you want a goldilocks market. These are niches that aren’t overly broad but also not overly narrow. Marketing to everyone means your message gets watered down and becomes ineffective. But as sales pro Mark Hunter recently told me, a narrow niche means that “when they get a head cold, you get pneumonia.” Don’t trap yourself; make sure there’s an escape route built into the credit union’s marketing strategy.

Ideally, your marketing acts as signposts pointing people to a destination. A home base. What is it? Most likely, it’s your website.

Typically, a “hub-and-spoke” model is best practice when you market. This bicycle wheel analogy means your website acts as the “hub” and each marketing tactic (email, social media, etc.) acts as a “spoke” that leads back to the site. There might even be one or two pages more than any others you want people visiting.

Don’t stumble into this. Do this with intention. Pick your home base pages at the start and direct people to them. Every time.

Bigger isn’t always better. More doesn’t mean a healthier credit union. Marketing is like eating a rich Godiva chocolate cheesecake. Delicious in the right quantities. Sickening when you overeat.

Improved consistency is more important than adding another marketing avenue you can’t manage. This mistake pops up all the time during assessments. An already-stretched-thin marketing team adds a blog or newsletter they can’t manage. It soon becomes outdated, giving members a bad impression when they see ancient content on the site.

Once again, Mark Hunter gives good advice: “You can’t work out at the gym once and be done. Staying in shape means you work out every day.”

Stop increasing your stress by adding more. Make marketing easier for yourself. Choose the most effective methods you can do consistently. Do less. Just do less better.

You need marketing to be faster? Write “soundbites” you can use in every piece to speak to your target niches. These are short, simple phrases that quickly capture interest. Donald Miller walks through five areas to create soundbites for:

Use your resonant messages in every marketing piece. And don’t get bored of what works. A big error some folks make is getting bored of good messaging for the sake of trying something different. Don’t do that. If it’s good, repeat it.

A surefire way to make marketing easier is to get help. This can look like employing AI to help with grunt work you don’t have the time or resources to handle. It could look like hiring in-house marketing people (if your overhead can support it). Or it could mean outsourcing marketing to a team of experts.

All these options take tactical work off your plate while still allowing you to drive strategy.

Making the simple complicated is remarkably easy to do. Stop making the simple into the impossible. You don’t always need more. You don’t need to market to everyone. You don’t need perfect marketing.

Shoot for good enough. Good enough you do strategically and consistently. Then, press on. You’ll find imperfect action gets you farther than perfect inaction ever could.