Your body is a temple. And so is your credit union website.

How’s your health today?

If you are eating right and getting plenty of rest, you should be OK. If you are exercising moderately and managing your stress levels, your health should be even better.

We have most likely heard it before.

Your body is a temple.

And if we take care of our bodies, our bodies will take care of us.

But if we mistreat our bodies, eat poorly, drink too much or don’t get enough sleep, our bodies will begin to breakdown.

Let’s switch gears for a moment.

How is your credit union’s website doing?

Sure, this metaphor may not make sense but stick with me.

If you are taking care of your website and keeping it up to date with the latest UX (user experience) best practices and digital marketing standards, your website should be doing a good job taking care of your credit union by generating leads and increasing share of wallet.

At the end of the day, that’s the goal of your website.

And if you are doing a great job of taking care of your website, it is probably outperforming all of your branch locations combined, specifically when it comes to generating revenue.

How do you know if you’re taking care of your website?

Just like you go to the doctor every year for a routine physical, we recommend the same thing for your credit union website by undergoing a yearly digital marketing assessment.

But in today’s humanized digital economy, a website is just one of the necessary digital marketing platforms required for credit unions to tell stories that sell. This is one reason why a website assessment alone might not provide you with enough relevant insight for you to make positive changes and improvements.

When was your website developed?

A digital marketing assessment, which includes a website assessment, is applicable for many credit unions regardless of when your website was developed. Just like if you have not been to the doctor in a while, it would make more sense to have a website assessment if your site was developed more than two or three years ago.

However, just like it’s recommended that you go to the doctor for a yearly physical, the same is true for your website to ensure it is healthy and up to date with the latest digital marketing best practices.

Even if your credit union website was developed less than a year ago, a digital marketing assessment is applicable. This is even more true if your website was developed by a full service marketing agency or extremely technical web development company.

To be clear, this is not a knock at your agency or web development company.

We respect them. And most likely, they did some great work for you. But the challenge of working with one of these companies is that they may not have taken the recommended approach needed to help you build a website that sells.

Oftentimes, when a credit union develops a new website, they get a new design, look and layout. But that’s about it.

There is so much more that goes into building a website that sells.

And this is where we can complement their efforts by providing both you and them with recommendations and insights on how to improve your new website even further.

At the end of the day, we strongly believe in collaborating with both credit unions and their marketing agencies or web development partners to move the needle of performance together.

How many leads does your website currently generate each month?

To understand how your body is performing, a physician may review your blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol and other critical metrics.

The same kind of reporting is required for your credit union website. And one good metric of a healthy website is determining how many leads your website is generating, and converting, each month.

When I do exploratory phone calls with credit unions and ask this question, credit unions respond one of two ways. Either they say, “We have no idea” or respond, “That’s a very good question.”

Knowing what to track is directly related to your credit union’s overall goals for growth.

If your credit union wants to build a website that sells, understanding how it is truly performing is critical. And this knowledge goes beyond reporting page views and visits.

Taking a holistic approach for continued website success

As I mentioned before, your website is a key platform in your credit union’s digital marketing and lead generation system.

If it was your body, think of your website as the heart. Because without a website that sells in today’s digital economy, your bank or credit union is pretty much dead.

And if there was a problem with your heart, a holistic treatment plan would be recommended. Remember, it’s about curing the ailment, not the symptoms.

So let’s assume the doctor hands you the following recommendations:

1. A prescription

2. A diet plan

3. A fitness plan

Before sending you on your way, the doctor reminds you that there are no quick fixes to get your heart back in shape.

And so you get to work.

You start eating right.

You hit the gym.

You get plenty of rest.

And before long, you start to see positive changes. You have a new outlook on life and a healthier heart. You even have to buy new clothes and people start to complement you.

By sticking to the doctors recommendations and plan, you have made vast amounts of progress over time.

But then something happens. The complements stop. Life gets busy again. And sooner or later, you fall back to your old ways which are closely followed by a return of your heart problems.

Does this story sound familiar when you think about your credit union’s website?

You launch a new website.

Everyone gets excited. You work hard for a few months keeping it updated with fresh new content to generate leads.

And then life gets in the way. Things get busy. All of a sudden everyone wants to put their departments promo on the home page. Before long your new website is ugly, out of shape and more importantly, it is not performing like it should.

What happened here?

Odds are, you forgot to maintain your credit union website, thus putting a major setback in all the progress you had made when it first launched.

Instead, you should have performed a yearly digital marketing assessment to ensure your website remained healthy.

The work and awareness required to take your body is just like the work and awareness required to take care of your website.

So let me ask… how is your credit union’s website doing?