Why don’t credit unions do digital marketing?

In our recent credit union marketing survey, we asked marketers how much of their budget was spent on digital marketing.

To our surprise, the majority indicated that less than 25% of their marketing budget was spent on tools that were intended to make their lives easier, and save them money.   So why is it that digital marketing is so lightly leveraged by marketers at our nation’s credit unions?

I recently wrote that marketers do need to be technologists, that technology was less expensive than ever before, and the IT department is much less of a blocker than it was a few years ago.  But perhaps it’s time to understand why credit union marketers might be reacting to digital marketing technology the way that they are. What we can do to overcome the real and perceived barriers to moving credit union marketing into the digital age?

There are thousands of definitions for digital marketing, which I’d encourage you to explore, but essentially, digital marketing is a term used to describe the interactive marketing of your institution’s products and services, leveraging the power of digital technologies to convert leads into customers, and keep those customers.    It’s not paper, it’s not print, it’s not person-to-person.

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