If you stood on the 50-yard line of a packed stadium and you knew everyone wearing orange that day was in the market to buy a home,
…how much time AND money could you save by simply ignoring prospects who weren't qualified (in this case, people not wearing orange)?
I stumbled into the Credit Union industry by accident.
The VP of Marketing, Pamela Herrmann, at Mortgage Cadence (an Accenture company) had a Credit Union client that needed help generating traffic.
They weren't doing anything online.
Although I had no prior experience running paid advertising for Credit Unions, I was confident that I could get the job done.
However, without the transfer of confidence from Pamela to her client about me, maybe Randy Wacker and Gesa Credit Union wouldn't have hired me.
During my research, studying the competition and the Credit Union industry in general, I quickly discovered the following:
… although consumer banking habits have changed, Credit Unions (as an industry) have not changed their primitive marketing and advertising strategies.
In today's article, I'm going to walk you through why an opportunity has emerged for Credit Unions who are willing to embrace digital advertising in their marketing efforts and how they can disrupt their markets by showing up digitally in ways that are not in their competitor's radar (at least not yet).
With digital marketing, you can leverage precision-targeted ads that only engage prospects in the market to buy a home (unlike traditional forms of advertising: TV, Direct Mail, Billboards, Radio, etc.).
While your competition is asleep at the wheel, you will discover (step-by-step) how it's possible to for you to seize both market and member shares in your area when it comes to originating home loans.
I started working with Gesa Credit Union in August of 2018. In 2019, January through August, we were on track for a record year (meaning, it didn't take long for us to find our stride between August 2018 and December 2018).
In fact, June and July 2019 were back to back record months for Gesa. In June, we closed 33 million followed by 42 million in July.
Getting Prospects To Apply For a Mortgage Loan With You Is Easy When You Know Who To Ignore With Your Marketing Efforts
Did you know that most humans are leaving digital footprints that give us the data we need to qualify them as potential home buyers?
At Marama Marketing, we extract that data from your website, social media and other digital assets.
We then weave campaigns that work hand in hand (across multiple platforms) to acquire leads and customers for your Credit Union.
A Warning:
Some Directors and Vice Presidents of Mortgage Lending may read this article and be slightly intrigued.
However, when their CEO tells them they have to increase borrower shares and lower their cost-to-close, that's when they will come to the realization that they need a different strategy than the one they've been using over the years (which is primitive in 2019).
Although doing what you have been doing (maintaining status quo) may often feel safe; sometimes, it can be very risky because all the rules have changed.
Take Randy, for instance…
I'm sure he had a myriad of reasons to pass on the opportunity to work with Marama Marketing, including the fact that Richland, WA is 2,586.8 miles from Gettysburg, PA (where I reside).
Nope, not Randy… It took us exactly 27-days between our introduction and agreement (June 19, 2018 – July 16, 2018).
The 4 most common marketing and advertising strategies that Credit Unions use (which are primitive in 2019) that are bleeding money and cutting into their return on investments
Before we go over my step-by-step methodology to help you seize both market and member shares in your area, let's talk about a few marketing strategies that most Credit Unions lean on and their shortcomings.
Television:
What's great about Television advertising is that you can reach a lot of people. The networks will sell you on the idea that they can reach your target audience based on the shows your prospects watch but every 25-45-year-old is NOT in the market to buy a house (some may already own a home).
//– Quick side note –//
As referenced in the introduction, these primitive marketing strategies do not do a great job of identifying qualified prospects who are wearing orange.
//– End side note –//
Just because the television audience fits a certain profile, it doesn't mean they are in the market to buy a home. Nonetheless, if your ideal prospects get targeted by your ads, how many of them have a DVR (meaning, they are skipping the commercials)?
How many use commercials as an opportunity to go to the bathroom; pause the TV (to make a call, yell something to the kids, etc.) and then resume their show when enough time has elapsed for them to fast-forward all the commercials? You don't have to put yourself in your prospect's shoes; consciously observe your own behaviors around television commercials.
Direct Mail:
If Millennials are the future of your Credit Union, do you believe that direct mail is the best medium to reach and engage them? Most millennials are notorious for throwing out bills and other important financial documents before they even read the envelopes. Which means, you are advertising on HOPE: you hope they get your direct mail campaign, you hope they read it and you hope they take action (without having any way to track your results).
*There are ways to track your direct mail campaigns, digitally, but I assume you are currently not…
Billboards:
Four things need to happen in order for your billboard campaign to stand a chance:
a) Your prospect has to drive on that ‘specific' road
b) Your prospect has to notice one of the many billboards during their route (most people develop ad blindness to billboards) while simultaneously ignoring one or more of the distractions listed below
c) Your prospect's distractions could include, but are not limited to, other motorists, passengers (especially kids), cell phone, the subconscious (ever drive from point A to B and not realize how you got there?), entertainment (music, podcast, etc)
d) If you are able to overcome all the above challenges, your message STILL has to be both timely AND compelling for your prospect to take action
Radio:
Speaking of entertainment, we are not talking about your grandparents who had ONE option. Today, we have so many options to choose from: Podcasts, Sirius XM, Pandora, Spotify (just to name a few). Like their TV counterpart, not many people are listening to radio let alone making consumer decisions off of radio advertising.
The Digital Marketing Blueprint for Credit Unions in 2019
A 10K foot overview of the digital marketing strategy for Credit Unions:
- I meet with you and we go over your most effective customer acquisition strategy, mapping out the journey for your prospects (on and offline).
- We then review your website (and online assets) to identify opportunities for me to track micro-conversions throughout the prospect's journey (i.e. button clicks, video views, form submissions, scrolling 75% of a page, etc).
- Next, I interview a few key players in the loan origination process i.e. Loan Officers.
- Once I've collected enough information, including research on your competitors, we meet again and we identify compelling offer(s) that will get your prospects excited about lending from you.
- I then work with my designer to craft compelling ads. If you have a design team, in-house, and would prefer to use them (or split test ads), that's an option as well.
- We launch your marketing campaigns on various platforms through several targeting options.
- I build segmented audiences based on how your prospects are engaging with the ads and in conjunction with the initial tracking I set up in step-two.
- Seamlessly and subtly, we move prospects through each stage of the loan origination process (based on steps one and two)
- Various tools and software allow me to track conversions and traffic flow.
- We leverage that data/feedback to forecast and optimize future campaigns.
That’s the general overview of how the digital marketing strategy works. Let’s dive into a more detailed step-by-step case study from one of my clients to see a real-life example of the processes above.
Case Study: How Gesa Credit Union eclipsed their 2019 goal by August and are projected to increase their volume by 45% from 2018
As a digital marketing agency for Credit Unions, there are two things that we want to understand right away:
1. The customer journey for your members/non-members once you become aware that they might be in the market to buy a home.
2. Which home loan origination strategies are you currently using and what offers are your customers responding to.
Equipped with the above information, during our preliminary research, we can compare how you stack up against the competition in your area. We want to get a clear picture, from a future home buyer's perspective, what options are available to them and how we can differentiate you from your competitors.
Once we map out the customer journey for your prospects, we have to set up the tracking on your website(s), social networks and any other online properties.
This tracking allows us to do various things:
- Segment website visitors (build audiences) based on how they engage with your website (watched 95% a video, clicked on the ‘Apply Now' button, scrolled more than 75% of a page, etc.)
- Tell Facebook or Google that someone just completed an application after clicking an ad on their platform
- Let Google Analytics know that someone clicked the ‘Apply Now' button
- And So Much More…
Through segmentation, we can seamlessly and subtly move prospects through each stage of the loan origination process based on how they are engaging with your content.
More importantly, we can cut costs and increase your return on investments by ignoring prospects who are not engaging with your content due to the fact that we are tracking and analyzing their digital footprint.
However, before we even worry about traffic or paid advertising, we have to make sure that we have a compelling offer that will get your prospect's attention.
When a prospect clicks on an ad, they are raising their hand and saying that they might be in the market for a home loan. Once they enter our ecosystem (visit your website, read a blog post, watch a video), our tracking captures that initial interest.
After that single engagement, the fortune is in the followup.
Now that the prospect is in our web, we can weave campaigns that work hand in hand (across multiple platforms) to acquire leads and customers. As we are building these audiences, platforms like Google and Facebook are also capturing data about the people who end up completing the online home loan applications.
Once we've captured enough data, we can ask platforms like Facebook and Google to do the heavy lifting when it comes to finding new prospects in the market to buy a home that we haven't previously engaged with our marketing.
Since other businesses/websites also use Google and Facebook products, these platforms (Google & Facebook) can track the online patterns/behaviors of prospects on other sites that we do not control.
As a result, these platforms can backtrack and identify the digital footprint of most people who previously completed our home loan application (i.e. Facebook & Google can identify the top 5-10 websites that most applicants visit before completing a home loan application).
This type of intelligence can not only significantly lower your acquisition costs, but it can also help us find other prospects who are exhibiting similar online behaviors/patterns (visiting the top 5-10 websites) as the people who have previously completed our home loan application. Furthermore, we can tell these platforms to focus on people who haven't engaged with any of our ads' yet (i.e. find new prospects to fill our pipeline).
By leveraging Marama Marketing's proprietary approach to data-driven marketing, the science of paid traffic for a greater ROI, we were able to take Gesa Credit Union from zero online applications to as many as eleven in one day.
In spite of the early success with Gesa, breaking records/crushing our 2019 annual goal, we have only tapped into 10% of the strategies we can deploy.
For instance, with Google alone, there are 3 major campaigns types that we can leverage for Credit Unions (Search, Display and Video). With just the Display Network alone, there are over 147 different combinations we can target your ideal prospects.
Of the strategies we've deployed, our most effective one has been our ability to place a specific piece of content near the end of the customer journey (to nudge a prospect into completing the online application) thanks to the initial tracking/segmentation we put in place.
How effective has this strategy been?
Other Credit Unions are paying over $300 per completed online application. According to Facebook (image above), there were 169 completed applications at $52.72 each in a 30-days span.
In 29 weeks (206 days), that single piece of content (strategically placed in the buyer's journey) has generated 38,676 unique visitors. Of which, 13,547 (clicks) came from paid advertising. That means the other 24,234 visitors came to that content as a result of social shares & engagement on social media (e.g. free traffic).
Gesa Credit Union did not (and currently does not) have a blog. Marama Marketing created this education-based content from scratch and the content had to be written in such a way that it was: emotionally compelling, intellectually interesting and (most importantly) shareable.
Want the behind the scenes look at the above education-based content that has generated 181 completed home loan applications at $62.87 each from Facebook?
The hardest part about online advertising is attribution, understanding which platform (or ad) produced the conversion. For most Advertising Agencies, it's like asking them which one of these six beers got me drunk?
Through the aforementioned tracking, referenced throughout this article, Marama Marketing has made tracking the number one priority in its advertising efforts. That is the only way to make informed decisions and scale profitable campaigns.
The above dashboard is one of the many custom ways Marama Marketing tracks its campaigns.
Conclusion:
I just gave you a glimpse into how Marama Marketing is partnering up with Credit Unions and how we are bringing in so much new business for our clients that lending departments are having trouble keeping up with all the new leads.
Is that a problem your Credit Union would like to have?
Got a question or comment?
Post it in the comment section below.
