Existing and prospective credit union members, like everyone else, are bombarded with marketing efforts and advertising whenever they’re online or on their mobile devices. To reach your audience, and more importantly, generate responses, means you have precious little time to catch their attention and have it stick. Effective digital marketing therefore is highly targeted and appeals to the needs of your prospects in ways that are instant and obvious.
Credit unions can grow their member base by deploying effective digital marketing.
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The first and most important step is to know the audience or prospect’s needs. Credit unions, like any other financial services institution, need members or customers. Savers and spenders need accounts. Car buyers need auto loans. Home buyers need mortgage loans. Marketing that’s too generalized may still appeal to some but will likely be ignored by many others. Targeting your prospects more specifically and crafting your messaging to convey the solution to your prospects’ needs can garner more responses – and more business.
Home buyers may not think about credit unions as an option for their loan unless you let them know it’s available.
Home mortgage loans typically represent the largest loan that any consumer will have. This scale also represents more income to the lender than a loan of a far lower amount. Most prospective and repeat home buyers, when thinking of mortgage loans, will first think of mortgage companies, and that can mean lost opportunity for a credit union. Consumers need to know that a credit union can fill that need just as well if not better than a much larger mortgage-only company can.
Appealing to prospective home buyers, be they existing credit union members or not, means letting them know that the option is there to finance their home with the same potential benefits that members may enjoy for other services.
Today’s market presents new opportunities for credit unions to expand their business.
Rapidly rising interest rates, along with rapidly rising home values, have ushered in new opportunities for home owners to benefit from growing home equity. Credit unions can benefit greatly from this market when they initiate digital marketing strategies that encourage target owners with appreciated homes and lower loan balances to tap into their home equity.
can be convenient for borrowers and offer lenders protection from rising rates in that most will rise right along the “prime” rate. Once a line of credit is opened, borrowers enjoy immediate access to funds by simply writing a check or making payments directly from their account. Effective marketing for credit unions can involve proposing HELOCs as an easy solution for home owners with equity to pay for home improvements, college educations, vacations, weddings or just about anything else.
With many first mortgage loans locked in at historically low rates, home equity lines will likely become more and more popular. They typically provide access to funds at lower rates than credit cards or personal loans and have much more flexible repayment terms.
Credit union digital marketing for car buyers should be equally focused.
Members with auto loans near payoff dates are prime candidates for a new car and a new loan. Keeping good records is tantamount to engaging in effective target marketing to past borrowers. Utilizing a good CRM system is key to maintaining a solid database that can be sorted and segmented so your marketing can be too. There’s little reason to market auto loans to borrowers that just closed one, yet there’s every reason to market auto loans to those that closed 4 or more years ago.
The same targeting concepts can and should be used for all service types.
Checking, savings, Christmas club accounts, personal loans – any readily available service or product offered should be marketed as such in ways that appeal to those in need of them. And of course, the more you know about your prospects and what their current needs may be, the easier it is to segment or categorize your digital marketing efforts accordingly.
A good CRM will not only allow you to create separate marketing lists but will also contain existing marketing materials and/or provide you with the ability to create your own right inside the same system. Digital marketing can be done in a “set it and forget it” manner so once your “rules” are set up, they will fire automatically and initiate campaigns that drip your messaging on regular intervals of your choosing.
Need to see what a CRM can do for you? Click here for a Surefire CRM demo today.
Brian Larrabee
Content Director
Brian’s entire professional career has centered in real estate. He’s designed, built and brokered homes. He’s provided over half a billion dollars in mortgage loan financing to everyone from first time-buyers to the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies He’s a published author with articles in periodicals,
hedge fund websites and trade publications. Brian has traveled the country and been on broadcast radio to speak in front of hundreds of his industry contemporaries. He’s also created and developed hundreds of educational products from print to digital used throughout the U.S. and beyond, which make the process of buying and financing a home easier for all. Brian is a father, real estate investor, outdoorsman, pilot, skier, golfer and plays ice hockey in several men’s leagues every week of the year.