Getting more from 4 tried-and-true marketing methods
With the landscape of the banking world constantly shifting and changing, it’s sometimes difficult to know where to spend your time, energy, and resources in regards to marketing. On one hand, marketing can be expensive and a hit-or-miss prospect, yet it’s essential to informing consumers about your brand and products. Marketing is a necessity when it comes to remaining relevant and noticed in your community and with both your current members and potential future ones.
Finding the best way to spend your marketing dollars will vary from place-to-place, area-to-area, but here are 4 reimagined old school marketing techniques, to market your credit union to the public that could be momentum shifters for you:
Targeted (and Re-targeted) Advertising
Advertising is nothing new. Advertising is an old and well-worn practice in marketing. Spend money to make money has been a long time business adage. However, like the world, advertising has changed. No longer must you have a dozen 30 second TV spots running in conjunction with radio ads and newspaper full pagers. Gone are the days of throwing your message out there with no more control over it than putting the pen to the checkbook. Nowadays, the marketer has more control.
Targeted advertisements are taking the marketing world by storm because of the way they interact with the audience we hope to reach. Targeted ads work in a couple of different ways:
- Specified ads using platforms like Facebook ads or LinkedIn that allow you to select specific age ranges, interests, demographics, geographical locations, etc. These options allow for a great level of customization when it comes to selecting your audience and the amount your message can be seen. Which makes your targeted marketing more precise, with the ability to promote different offers to different age groups and demographics.
- There’s also retargeting. Retargeting focuses your efforts on an audience that has already demonstrated an interest in you by visiting your website. Affordable third-party services can automate the process, so people who visited your website will automatically see your ads when they’re surfing elsewhere on the internet. Your ads can be served on hundreds of the most popular website and channels. Normally these popular sites are very expensive advertising, but retargeting ensures you’re dollars are only used towards likely customers. Have you ever searched for something and then noticed an ad for that very thing at a later time? This is retargeting.
Events
Field marketing, such as hosting an event, is one of the best ways to draw crowds to a branch or promote the brand as a whole. Now I’m sure most institutions do something already, but even if you already do it’s worth another look. Partnering with local businesses to show support for their business while promoting your brand. Perhaps you’re in a college town and can sponsor some fiscal responsibility presentations for students and local community members. The options of how to interact with your public is endless.
With a growing national perspective on the importance of local business, doing more local events could help push you past the larger mega financial institutions and endear you more in the hearts of your members and the prospective non-members as well.
Ongoing Engagement
This is going to sound simple, but it can go a long way. Ongoing engagement is maintaining a presence in the lives of your consumers and target demographics. Using email campaigns is a great way to maintain a line of communication with your public, to let them know about upcoming offers, new products, and any other bit of information you want to send out.
For instance, Buzz Points sends out frequent email campaigns on behalf of their credit unions to their cardholders to raise awareness of upcoming promotional campaigns such as a double points weekend or a refer-a-friend campaign. They also use email campaigns to promote cross-selling of reward points with signing up for auto, home, or other small loans, incentivizing the cardholders to sign up for their loans and receive extra reward points. Buzz Points assists the credit union with these campaigns by offering intensive customer service for the not only the credit union, but the cardholders themselves.
Offering helpful and easy to understand support is a great example of ongoing engagement. Good programs and campaigns have a staff associated with them that can help ease any troubles or worries that a consumer might have. It allows the institution to bridge the business-consumer gap better by being able to help people in a clear and concise manner.
Ongoing engagement like this can be a simple way to get the public informed and engaged in your product or service when used the correct way and trained support make it easy to interact with those consumers when they come to use the product.
Contests
People love competition. It’s in our nature to want to succeed, so harnessing that nature is a good way to pump the brand and get people involved. Contests can range from photo contests on Instagram or twitter, to contests that promote members to be more active with your service.
To use Buzz Points again as an example: They recently ran a “Redeem For Charity” competition that had cardholders at different credit unions use their cards more to build up points and then redeem them for charity. The credit unions that redeemed the most would win a sizable donation to a charity of their choosing. This contest, like the many others that Buzz Points had run in the past, was a success in that it incentivized cardholders to swipe their debit cards more often in an attempt to win the contest.
Something like this could be just the spark your credit union could use and can be tailored exactly to your target demographic or towards the specific goal you want to reach is.
These 4 marketing efforts are just basics to marketing your credit union’s services and products, but these basics form building blocks for successful futures. Growth and innovation is the goal of every business, but it all has to start somewhere.
