By Tansley Stearns
It’s a bird, it’s a plane…no, it’s a credit union marketing professional! They may not be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but the breadth and depth of the powers needed to navigate the competitive marketplace of financial services is astonishing. Let’s take a look at the components that make up these superheroes.
Creativity is a marketing person’s wheelhouse. As more marketing channels are developed, choosing the best ones for each campaign and each demographic you are trying to reach is a challenge. Creative marketers find the right balance of traditional media, social and online options, and point-of-sale in credit union branches. This is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but it is smart and targeted toward your objectives.
It’s easy to confuse creativity with doing things differently. But a key component is also consistency, particularly when you are talking about building a strong brand. Today’s consumers are looking for value and trust. The marketing campaigns that catch my attention are those where I can immediately recognize the institution. Unfortunately, this is not common in the credit union space, but organizations that do it well really stand out.
Empathy describes the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, relating to and sharing their feelings. With marketing, this refers to understanding your members’ needs and offering appropriate solutions. It’s easy to get caught up in promoting product features, but it’s more likely that benefits such as saving time or money are more relatable to your targeted consumer.
Analytical thinking is perhaps a newer addition to the superpower toolkit, but is rapidly becoming the most necessary. In this time of economic belt tightening, marketers need to prove their value to preserve their budgets, and the way to do that is by the numbers. While marketers are considered right brain types, most of the members of the credit union executive team (i.e. those who approve the budgets) are left brainers. Marketers need to be able to talk their language and show this is what was expected to happen, here is what happened, and here is how the institution profited from the effort.
In my past role as a judge for CUES Golden Mirror Awards, I was always most impressed with the candidates that vied for the GMA Golden Shoestring awards. This award recognizes credit unions which execute memorable efforts with limited budgets–excellent examples of the synergy generated when creativity meets analytics.
Persuasiveness is a necessary strength to get organizational buy-in to the marketing plan. Frequently, marketers are proposing expending resources in new and unproven ways, so the ability to explain strategies clearly and compellingly is vital.
It also gets to the heart of the sales process. Some people think of marketing as advertising, but it’s when advertising is paired with sales that you’ll realize the biggest results. Marketers who are tapped in to their organization understand what is happening in the branches and call centers, and coordinate campaigns appropriately. There is really nothing worse than a campaign that makes promises to the public that are not fulfilled by the front-line staff.
Above all, perseverance is what makes today’s credit union marketers true superheroes. There has never been a better time to be a credit union. Consumers are fed up with big banks and they are searching for new solutions. As one of the best-kept secrets in financial services, marketers have a big job to get the word out and make sure potential members understand and appreciate the credit union difference. It won’t happen overnight, but the hearty will keep trying with the same spirit that exemplifies credit unions themselves.
Tansley Stearns is Director of Innovation & Impact at the Filene Research Institute. She is a past CUES Golden Mirror Awards™ judge and multiple award winner.
Submit your truly awesome marketing material to the 2013 CUES Golden Mirror Awards by April 15 and get a free GMA T-shirt! The early bird deadline is April 26 and the final deadline is May 10, 2013. Enter now.
