Trust and Persistence for Advertising Results!

by Lyle Heller, CU-VO

Continuing thoughts about developing the upcoming marketing plans and budgets.

Trust is perhaps the most important element of credit union success.  After all, members are leaving their money in the care of the credit union.  While, it is true that credit unions and banks are both insured to minimize the risk of complete loss, that fact only levels the playing ground.  Even though the credit union is member owned, trust must be established.

In this session, we look at two aspects needed for advertising results; the concept of trust and the need for persistence.

In previous comments we talked about newspaper’s changing role in credit union advertising.  Please recall comments by Professional Advertising of Arlington, VA in an especially thoughtful article discussing effective newspaper advertising were they state “With all types of media, Consistent Advertising = Familiarity = Trust = Members. People won’t buy from you until they trust you.  Trust and confidence take time to build up. To be successful with advertising, you need persistence, patience, and a budget to keep your advertising running to build that trust.  Your ad should appear in the same place in the newspaper at least weekly for an indefinite period [forever].”

A dictionary understanding of trust is relatively easy to comprehend, such as having confidence on the outcome of events.  The member is expecting their shares will increase in value and they will have positive experiences in dealing with your credit union.

The challenge is gaining trust of potential members.

Many of us have developed a distrust of printed words, especially in advertising.  We discount a major proportion of printed ads we read because of this distrust.

Celebrities have been an advertising staple for years.  There is no doubt that it works, at least in some circumstances.  But would an endorsement by Tiger Woods of your credit union hold much sway?  If he is a member of your credit union and members saw him there, it probably would.  But otherwise, most visitors will not believe that he knows what he is endorsing in this case and not trust his endorsement.

If you could personally meet each potential member, they would make a judgment of trust relatively quickly.  That judgment will be based on your words, tone of voice, body language, and general impressions.

Credit union presidents are typically selected because of their ability to demonstrate trustworthiness as well as competence.  The credit union board wants credit union success and should be choosing a president who expresses trustworthiness in personal encounters.  The use of video, such as YouTube, has been an increasingly popular way to provide this type of face time with potential members.

But, there are several concerns when using YouTube videos.  These videos usually add delay to web page loading time, increasing likelihood of the visitor bouncing out.  The YouTube style video requires the visitor to “play” it and research is demonstrating that many are not played.  Further, there are findings indicating that 87% of YouTube videos are abandoned in the first ten seconds.

Also, a YouTube video has an identifiable webpage location, so a visitor probably will not view it a second or third time (unless it is one of the viral cases, like the cell phone popping popcorn video that plays to existing fears or a truly funny item.)

Since persistence is also a key marketing tenet, this single viewing aspect means that the six to 12 exposures needed for action is not going to happen.

The credit union should consider video overlay as the alternative.  In this case, the member does not see the video on every visit.  But multiple exposures to the message require more than a couple of weeks of calendar time.  If the video overlay is seen by visitor only once a week, several weeks are required before the visitor “gets the message”.

In using video overlays, the concept of “less is more” rules.  The major message content appears in body language and the “novelty” aspect rather than the words themselves.  Unlike YouTubes where the single viewing phenomenon means content needs to be comprehensive, video overlays capture attention for the textual portion of the website.  Once trustworthiness is established, visitors will look at the text content.

Build trust by face to face connection and by persistence without being obnoxious.

This series is authored by Lyle Heller of CU-VO.  Mr. Heller holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from University of Wisconsin – Whitewater and a Masters of Business Administration in Production and Operations from Marquette University.  Mr. Heller served as Executive Vice President of two CUNA organizations.  He has lectured at the university level in Quantitative Decision Analysis, Simulation, Systems Analysis, and Marketing for more than ten years.  Additionally, he was a top-ranked winner of the 2005 Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan contest.  CU-VO is a strategic partner of CUNA Strategic Services to provide video overlays to credit unions.  Learn more at www.cu-vo.com and follow CUVOTweet.