As with many businesses these days, credit unions are often focused on doing more with less and prioritizing immediate results over long-term growth strategies. This leads to prioritizing short-term lead generation over brand investment.
Many businesses, including credit unions, think of brand and performance advertising as competing against each other. From what we have experienced with clients, the strongest growth comes from using both together.
Marketing leaders who challenge the advertising status quo position brand media as a performance multiplier that will lower future acquisition costs, improve efficiency, and strengthen demand generation over time.
It is possible to build future demand while capturing current intent.
The Membership Growth Challenge Facing Credit Unions
The headline for credit unions is that membership continues to grow. The subheadline is that growth has slowed significantly and is mostly being enjoyed by the largest credit unions.
According to the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), nearly 55% of federally insured credit unions had fewer members by the end of Q1 2026 than the year prior. While membership in the industry is growing overall, much of that growth is being driven by larger credit unions, leaving many community-based institutions struggling to maintain or expand their membership.
If you’re not in that coveted group that continues to see membership growth, your first question may be why? Several factors contribute to slower membership growth.
- Credit union members continue to age.
- Younger consumers remain less familiar with the credit union model.
- Consumers expect seamless, personalized digital experiences.
- More competition from national banks, digital banks, and fintech companies.
McKinsey & Company research found that younger consumers have a much lower draw to credit unions than older generations. According to Gallup research, reported by Callahan & Associates, 40% of Gen Z non-members say they don't know much about credit unions, and 19% just aren’t sure how to join.
On top of the decline in membership for the majority of credit unions in the U.S., the cost of member acquisition is increasing. With intensified competition, more focus is placed on getting attention, which requires more advertising.
This added focus on advertising includes rising digital media costs across channels like paid search, social media, streaming video, and display. This is ironic, as the growth in competition from traditional and digital banks and fintech companies drives it.
What’s a credit union marketer to do?
Why Brand Investment Improves Performance Results
We’ve established that advertising is one of the requirements of building back member growth. Where do you start?
Building trust and familiarity is key. While the pressure to get immediate members is real, they have to know about you and trust you before they’re going to sign up.
Using only short-term performance strategies often trades future growth for expensive, quick wins. Start by investing in brand campaigns, which not only introduce you to potential members but also fuel long-term ROI and make every future dollar work harder by lowering acquisition costs.
Think of brand advertising as a multiplier of your performance tactics. It doesn’t just add to those results; it multiplies them. When members already know and trust you, they convert at higher rates. Brand and performance working together make every media dollar work harder. Once they are familiar with your brand, they are more likely to act when seeing a service line message.
The Case for a 50/50 Media Allocation
This may seem extreme for some, and it may depend on each credit union’s situation, but we recommend 50% of media investment support upper-funnel tactics that drive long-term ROI.
Brands work to build performance, local relevancy, and trust with potential customers. Stronger brand equity directly affects performance tactics, since as brand equity strengthens, consideration sets shrink. This allows performance media conversion when users are ready to take action.
Building an Integrated Brand + Performance Strategy
We discussed the necessity of using advertising to increase declining membership in the wake of a new generation of consumers and growth in competition. We also agree it takes a media strategy that includes both a brand and a performance strategy, ideally broken out close to 50/50. Where to go from here?
Your integrated brand and performance strategy needs messaging alignment, creative that connects with your audiences, ideally led by your first-party data, and segmented by different audience types and locations.
Being fully aware of your customer’s journey is key to building the right audience sequencing. Use the right messaging and product-line promotion based on where the user is in their search.
Using full-funnel planning, a media strategy that targets audiences at all stages of their journey, from awareness to conversion and loyalty, means using multiple channels to reach them and drive a lift in conversions.
The fact is, when users are exposed to your ads on more than one channel, they convert at a higher rate. Credit union campaigns have shown quantifiable lift from integrated strategies. We’ve seen this lead to a 113% lift in application starts when users are exposed to two or more programmatic channels, for example.
The highest-performing credit unions will stop treating brand and performance as separate disciplines, and start seeing brand as a multiplier to their performance strategy. Organizations that invest in both will create stronger demand, lower acquisition costs, and more sustainable growth.
Credit union marketers who execute an omnichannel approach to their advertising program will be better equipped to increase acquisition, strengthen loyalty, and make every media dollar work harder.
Where to Start:
- Audit current media allocations.
- Track branded search growth alongside conversions.
- Introduce upper-funnel KPIs.
- Balance brand and performance campaigns by channel and budget.
