How to Measure the Success of Your Advertising

Gone are the days of gauging the success of advertising by counting the number of people who come through your door to sign up for a loan or account. Now, advertisers have many tools are their fingertips to analyze and optimize campaigns. As a growing credit union, it’s important to consistently measure the success of your advertising to build a smarter budget, better understand your audience, and improve the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Creating your advertising strategy

The financial services industry is a saturated market – on a local and global level. So many financial institutions promise the same thing and promote similar values. That’s why staying top of mind is so important. This can be done by creating a diverse marketing plan that meets members where they are and engages them throughout life’s financial journeys.

• Set your objectives: Create specific goals for your campaign. Are you looking to increase your membership? Are you aiming to increase loan and credit card applications? First, determine the “why” of your campaign.
• Determine your budget: The size of your credit union, level of competition, and need for growth will help determine how much you should budget for marketing. Using resources like our marketing budget calculator will help you get a better idea.
• Define your audience: Who are you trying to reach? What is their demographic and how do they consume media? It’s important to understand your potential membership base.
• Define your message: Now that you know the “who” of your campaign, it’s time to create your message. Your advertising should inform the consumer what value your financial product brings back to them while incorporating what’s unique about you.
• Choose your channels: Look at your audience and figure out which advertising channels will be best for those groups. This should include a mix of online and traditional strategies like billboard, TV, search, digital display, social media, over-the-top (OTT), and more.

Thinking long-term

Staying top of mind is a long-term strategy that creates strong relationships with members over time. First, think about the big picture of what you’re credit union is trying to accomplish. If it’s to increase membership, consider the many opportunities in life that a person would engage with your financial institution.

In an ideal world, the individual would think about your brand as early as adolescence. Smart credit unions can engage teens by creating parent-monitored youth banking accounts and apps. The concept not only helps teach money management skills but builds trust and loyalty with your credit union in the earliest stage of their financial life.

Credit unions can tap into existing membership to increase loan applications and encourage longer-term engagement. Say someone was just approved to receive a credit card. You should assume they probably don’t know about all your account and loan offerings yet. Tactics like email automation or personalized mailers will make the member think of you when they eventually need a car loan or mortgage.

Determining advertising performance

Like many aspects of managing a financial business, marketing success is a cumulative result. All of your marketing efforts work together to help achieve your goals. This means marketers must look beyond initial digital data to understand what’s successful – it should be evaluated with overall membership data and trends.

Of course, online marketing is the first thing you can refer to when evaluating initial campaign performance. Real-time analytics can help you compare messaging and see what your target audiences are responding to. When you advertise online, you can begin with a strategy and adjust it as time goes on. This way you don’t spend too much of your budget on something that isn’t effective.

Utilizing the benefits of online marketing

Online ad platforms allow you to get into the nitty gritty of your campaign performance. You can track views, clicks, and conversions. This valuable data not only informs future successful campaigns but can also teach you a lot about your members and community, what they want and how you can better fulfill those needs.

• Targeting: With Google and social ad campaigns, you can target specific keywords, locations, times, ages, interests, and more.
• Traffic: You want your ads to be online at the same time as your audience. Google provides estimated traffic volumes and shows you the number of people seeing your ad throughout the day, and knowing when your audience online tells you when to spend money on more exposure.
• Budgeting: Online advertising lets you adjust your spending manually or set your budget to optimize your budget automatically as the campaign gathers data.
• Testing: Online advertising allows you to test different messaging and images to see which ads drive action. You may even find that variations of the same ad work better at other times. Again, you can adjust your budget to push the more successful options.

Vibrant incorporates new technologies and media into credit union marketing strategies. We are the experts in helping credit unions expand into new markets, grow membership and increase loan utilization. With creative, targeted messaging and the right media mix, we achieve your growth and marketing goals with a higher ROI.