Can your credit union generate loan income through social media?

In today’s highly competitive market, financial institutions need to differentiate themselves as much as possible. Differentiation can take many forms, but any sort strategy that can generate loan income is especially important. Loan generation is important for financial institutions of all sizes, but for smaller credit unions and community banks, it is even more important as they often do not have the marketing budgets for traditional marketing campaigns and they cannot always compete on rate alone.

Having a well though out digital strategy is one of the most important things that financial institutions can do in order to reach today’s consumers. For many, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google +, etc) is a great place to start. Online shopping is bigger than it’s ever been and consumers are talking about your business and brand on these digital channels. The majority of these consumers will probably rarely ever step foot in one of your branches.. So, targeting them, bringing their business to you and gathering information from them has never been more important.

CitizensFirst Credit Union (CFCU) in Oshkosh, WI has been targeting these consumers through social media throughout 2014 and the statistics are staggering. In 2014 they focused on Facebook to not only grow their fan base, but, also get information from their members using social media. They have over 17% if their membership liking them on Facebook, and closed over $2 million in consumer loans using Facebook generated leads only. This led to not only scheduled interest income for the future, but, instant income to their bottom line from ancillary product sales on these loans.

They used a different tactics and strategies to find members who could save money by switching their loans to CFCU. They used Facebook to track that over 60% of the people who entered their Facebook driven contests said that they didn’t hear about their loan promotion through traditional media channels (billboards, radio, newspaper, Pandora, etc), but, instead they heard about it via Facebook.

This is just one example of a financial institution doing things just a little bit different to generate more business, and doing it without spending a lot of member’s money. Being trained on how to do these things is crucial to the future of your business. It’s never been more important to be innovative in the way you generate new business. What is your institution doing moving forward to stay ahead of the curve?