Inside Marketing: Best practices for building a dynamic digital brand

James Robert Lay, president of Digital Growth Institute, Houston, Texas, believes in humanizing a credit union’s digital brand, which starts and ends with the user experience. Here are his 10 must-haves for crafting a dynamic digital brand:

1. Implement secret shoppers in your consumer’s buying journey. Lay says that 94% of financial brands have not secret-shopped their website, compared to 72% shopping their lobbies. Unfortunately, financial institutions seem to build and launch their sites—and then leave them be without finding out what’s working and what’s not. This is contrary thinking, Lay points out, since 87% of all sales journeys start online, regardless of where the transaction is closed.

2. Understand what your members are feeling on a macro level. The key is to research qualitative data sets to understand what your members and potential members feel and why they think the way they do. Today, those feelings likely include uncertainty. For digital impact, you must capture consumers’ trust. To gain a consumer’s trust, strive to answer three questions immediately with your website: 1. Can I trust you? 2. How do you make me feel? 3. How can you help me?

3. Don’t lead with selling a product; lead with solutions for the member’s pain points. Empathizing with a consumer’s confusion or frustration and providing a solution builds trust. Giving someone the ability to make a better financial decision with confidence will build trust. Build trust before you talk about products and features.

 

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