Are you communicating results with your credit union team?

There’s nothing worse than working your fingers to the bone and then having your boss, CEO, and/or the board question the value of the credit union’s marketing efforts.  You know your marketing is successful because you can see the growth numbers, but are you really doing everything you can to communicate your results and show the value of marketing at your credit union?

Marketing budgets are typically the first to go when cuts need to be made.  A lot of the time, this is because everyone isn’t made aware of the direct ways in which marketing has grown and transformed the credit union.  To keep this from happening to you, consider adding a marketing report to your monthly to-do list.

A marketing report has many benefits:

• It is an easy way for you to recap and highlight your main priorities for the month tied directly to the credit union’s organizational goals.
• The report is a perfect stage for several key growth metrics that will quickly shed light on marketing successes:
  • Current growth
  • Annualized growth
  • Year-over-year trends
  • Progress toward growth goals
• You can include Return on Investment (ROI) for any campaigns that are currently running or have just ended, showing direct bottom line benefits to the credit union.
• Including performance of all marketing tactics not only communicates all of the ways you are marketing the credit union, but it also helps you to identify opportunities and make adjustments to the plan if necessary.
• You are already the expert, but a snapshot report like this will affirm to your boss and/or the board your important role within the credit union to drive its growth efforts and transform positive change across the organization.
• It can be the basis for any regular communications you have with the entire credit union so that everyone knows they are marketers and see the results of their efforts. This is a vital step in creating a culture of teamwork and empowerment throughout the credit union.
• Lastly, a marketing report is a great time for you to communicate what is working well, what isn’t working well, and why. If the phone is ringing off the hook from members calling to ask about loans, but loan growth is slow, this is a great opportunity to talk about what might be happening from a service or process standpoint to impede the success of your marketing efforts.

We work with many small credit unions across the country on their strategic marketing plans and execution, and each one of them is different from what they want to know.  For some, it’s the perfect amount of information, while others want to customize their reports for exactly how they prefer to receive information and data.  If you don’t currently write a marketing report, start by including as much of what you can from the list above and then ask for feedback about items to include for next time.