Top takeaways from judging the CUNA Diamond and MAC Awards
We’ve had the pleasure here at PixelSpoke of serving as judges for both the CUNA Diamond and the MAC Awards this year. That means that over the past few months, we’ve reviewed upwards of 200 entries, including videos, radio ads, annual reports, email campaigns, and more.
So, what have we learned? From our end of things, it’s been eye-opening to get more insight into the vast array of marketing initiatives for which many of you are responsible. We focus so much on websites, it can be easy to forget that your website is only one component of your marketing mix.
Still, we found that many of the best practices we’ve arrived at for credit union websites apply to other mediums as well. When we think about the few entries that really rose to the top amongst the hundreds that we reviewed, here are our top 5 takeaways:
- Differentiate by being local. That means drastically cutting down on stock photography and video clips. We even saw some of the same stock photos used by different credit unions! Of course, there are times we just need to fall back on stock, but the imagery you lead with should include real landmarks, businesses, and members. That’s how people will remember you. After all, you can’t differentiate on being a locally-owned cooperative if your imagery looks like a national megabank.
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