Most credit unions view marketing data as a reporting tool. What they don’t realize is that media data contributes more to the business than simply reporting campaign results. Marketing leaders should be using it as a decision-making channel that informs product development, member experience, and organizational strategy.
Marketing is a strategic partner because it has access to a wealth of audience data through attribution, behaviors, and direct feedback. This knowledge reveals unmet member needs and product fits.
Smart credit unions will use marketing data to make better business decisions, not just ad decisions.
The Value of Marketing’s Advertising Intelligence
While every marketing tactic - reviews, email, website, and local SEO contributes valuable insights that can and should be used for business intelligence, advertising campaigns offer a unique view of prospective and current member behavior. Ads engage consumers throughout their journey. Advertising reveals emerging demand, preferences, market, and product opportunities that can help guide broader organizational decisions.
While all marketing is needed to inform these decisions, advertising is often the fastest, richest, and most scalable source of marketing intelligence. Advertising is even more valuable when combined with email, organic social, local SEO, CRM data, etc. Using first-party data from these other channels completes the member picture.
Advertising is more than buying media and collecting results. It’s also learning from the data. Campaigns tell the story of what prospects and members want, how and why they make decisions, and provide business intelligence that can inform member experience, product strategy, and overall business planning.
It's about more than successful ad campaigns based on KPIs. It's about winning on business outcomes.
Implementing Marketing’s Advertising Intelligence
If you're only capturing and analyzing the metrics from your ad campaigns that show engagement, you're missing out on the signals your ad campaigns can provide to elevate your larger business goals. Here are a few ways you can use the data beyond just campaign results.
Marketing Understands Your Prospective Members
Advertising campaigns offer a unique window into prospective member behavior. Digging deeper into campaign signals reveals intent and demand through search behavior, content consumed, video engagement, download activity, product comparisons, and the life stages that create financial opportunities.
This data reveals how different audiences prefer to discover and consume information, helping identify the right channels to use based on segments like generation or age, geography, and life stages. These insights come from paid search, social, mobile apps, reviews, YouTube, email, and other touchpoints.
Data from advertising also identifies which audiences convert most effectively, which imagery and messaging resonate, and where there are future opportunities.
Unlike most credit union departments, marketing can observe changing consumer behavior before those changes appear in membership or product performance, allowing the organization to respond sooner.
Marketing Improves Member Experience
Data from your ad campaigns can also uncover where users may be hitting a wall or having a less than optimal experience. Marketing can identify high click-through rates paired with low application completion, high abandonment, and other signals that indicate barriers in the member journey.
Tying relationship intelligence from email, your CRM, website, surveys, reviews, and call centers with advertising data reveals why members stay, why they don’t, and what service issues they may be having.
These insights help move the conversation beyond campaign optimization. Shared with operations and member experience teams, they can be used to simplify applications, improve onboarding, reduce friction, and create a better overall member experience.
The Value of Connecting Marketing With Other Teams
When marketing works in a silo, they focus on the strategies and tactics that build brand awareness and drive leads and customer generation. Their tunnel vision is on creating, tracking, analyzing, and repeating, all based on the marketing goals they've set for campaigns.
When marketing partners with other internal teams like product and member experience, together they can use expanded campaign data to identify unmet needs, promote products and services, and improve member growth.
Using that same data can help align your brand promise with operational delivery, improve the member onboarding and application experience, and enhance the complete customer journey, recognizing obstacles that may keep them from conversion or building loyalty with your brand.
How Do You Make Marketing a Strategic Growth Partner?
Think of it like a closed loop. You take the first-party data you have to inform ad campaigns, monitor and optimize campaigns throughout, and return that company data to the system to continue feeding campaign planning.
But you don't stop there.
The greatest value comes from sharing that acquired knowledge across the organization to make informed business decisions.
That makes your campaign two-pronged:
- Growth of members and applications.
- Implementing that earned knowledge to make future business decisions.
It's a cycle of growth and learning.
5 Steps to Business Growth Through Marketing
- Review campaign performance and member behavior data to identify patterns, obstacles, and new member needs.
- Map member journeys from campaign launch to account openings and incorporate member feedback into media planning.
- Set up ongoing reporting with product, digital banking, member experience, and operations teams.
- Work together to prioritize improvements based on member impact and business goals.
- Track and measure how operational changes affect future campaign performance and member growth.
Credit Unions’ Marketing Opportunities
Credit unions not using marketing data to its full capabilities are leaving growth opportunities on the table.
Marketing can become a critical source of growth intelligence that shapes organizational priorities when it becomes part of the larger business conversation and its insights become part of the organization's planning.
Marketing evolves from continuously measuring and reporting results to shaping the growth of the business.
