Top 10 Tips to Market Your Credit Union in 2023

Where to invest your time, effort, and resources to maximize your impact

Headwinds point to a tougher economic environment for consumers worldwide, higher interest rates, and a looming risk of recession is presenting challenges to grow business in 2023. While it is hard on the one hand, there are opportunities rising on the other; the median housing prices are down, and businesses are stabilizing and recovering after two long years of the pandemic.

Credit Unions exist in a highly competitive market, yet if you are looking to attract more inbound traffic, there are prospects that are out there and there’s a lot of opportunity to reach out and make them aware of who you are.

Challenges facing the credit unions

The credit union industry faces many marketing challenges today. Competition from online-only banks and fintech companies has increased, and credit unions need to find ways to better reach and engage their members. Additionally, the slowing economy has slowed the demand for loans, and credit unions need to find ways to grow their market share.

The shift to online and digital banking is not without its challenges, however. Credit unions must ensure that their online platforms are secure and user-friendly and that their staff are trained to support digital channels. In addition, credit unions must find ways to stand out in a crowded and competitive online landscape.

As the world increasingly goes digital, credit unions must do the same to remain competitive. Online and digital banking is more convenient for members, who can now do everything from check their balances to apply for loans from the comfort of their homes. In addition, online and digital channels are more cost-effective for credit unions, who can save on brick-and-mortar costs by moving to an online-only model.

Despite the challenges, the shift to online and digital banking is essential for credit unions who want to remain relevant and competitive in the digital

Finally, hiring and retaining talent has become a challenge for credit unions as the industry faces increased regulatory compliance issues.

What can credit union do to better market themselves?

There are a number of ways credit unions can market themselves effectively online. By using a mix of digital marketing strategies, credit unions can reach a wide audience and engage potential and existing members.

Some digital marketing channels credit unions can use include search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Each of these channels has its own benefits and can be used to reach credit union members in different ways.

Credit unions should consider using a mix of these digital marketing channels to reach the widest possible audience. By using multiple channels, credit unions can create a well-rounded marketing strategy that can effectively engage members and grow their credit union.

As a credit union marketer, it’s important to measure website performance indicators to excel at business objectives and continuously manage the shift to cookieless and GA4. Your credit union website should be SEO-optimized and provide frictionless conversion and user experience.

Tracking website performance can be done through various tools, such as Google Analytics. By measuring key indicators including, website traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rate, you can gain insights into how well your website is performing and make necessary changes to improve it.

It’s also important to keep up with the latest changes in the industry, such as the shift to cookie less tracking and GA4. By staying up to date with these changes, you can ensure that your credit union website is always running optimally.

How credit unions can improve their organic and online presence in 2023

1. Choose a solid foundation for your website

Your website is your primary branding, customer experience and ecommerce engine for high visibility on search engines through high availability for search engine crawlers and site indexing, and automatic updates of sitemap.xml, and effective voice search optimization. The Milestone CMS was built from the ground up with search engine optimization in mind by making it easier for search engines to understand the site structure and meaning.

• Automatic updating of the XML sitemap
• Methods for helping search engine crawlers index the site
• Optimizing image and code compression
• The most effective voice search optimization on the market (without which voice searches of your content could be almost worthless)
• Milestone Local, a service that provides consistent local data like hours of operation to hundreds of listings – all linking back to your site
• And automatically deploying error-free advanced schemas

Milestone did research on 206 FinServ websites and found that 63% of sites were not SEO optimized

Download the research now

2. Optimize schemas across your website and web properties

Over 280 built-in schemas allow search engines to understand and index your content seamlessly. Tagged image optimization ensures your site’s readiness for the growing availability of visual search.

Schemas for new sites. A schema is a logical organization of website content so a search engine can understand the meaning and hierarchy of the information, such as which content relates to “credit union” and which content refers to “credit union near me.”

Many CMSes don’t offer a full, built-in, and automated schema mechanism for new sites like Milestone CMS does. Instead, they provide only manual tools, which are:

• Much slower
• More prone to error
• Less able to be updated quickly with Schema.org’s latest schema versions

3. Optimize for visual search

Images generate impressions in over 25% of search results, so present an opportunity for credit unions to increase awareness. An excellent media type to address that opportunity is inforgraphics that help teach financial concepts to existing and potential members.

Milestone CMS automatically tags your site images so they’re ready for that kind of search. Credit unions need to invest in images be thoughtful and strategic in their approach to deploying them garner the benfits.

4. Capture a higher share of mobile experiences

Make sure you have mobile-first design, mobile speed optimization, native Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and the ability to create Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).

As every website owner knows, mobile traffic is the majority of Internet traffic, and that will only continue as 5G, and higher wireless speeds come online. Currently, about 60% of Web site traffic is from mobile devices. The Milestone CMS is built for creating robust mobile site presences, through mobile-specific adaptive-responsive designs, enhancement of fast mobile loading with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and the ability to create Progressive Web Applications (PWAs).

Mobile sites created on the Milestone CMS can achieve very high speeds on Google’s Page Speed tests.

5. Eye-catching design and memorable content

Emphasize your message through our top-notch design and user experience. The visual design and quality of the textual content are key to users’ experience with your website, which is why Milestone employs in-house top-notch designers and content experts. Milestone also utilizes up-to-date user experience practices to help visitors find their answers and select your credit union products in as few clicks as possible. A careful integration of visual and interactive means that your pages will be easy to scan, fast to load, and contain messages that support your goals with your members.

6. Capture the local area engagement with events

An automated Event Feed populates your site calendar with up-to-date local events across multiple genres and generates hundreds of relevant, events-oriented pages – which search engines love.

A credit union for instance, might show dates and times of your virtual or in-person events, including workshops, education programs with your lending and product experts Q&A sessions. You can also connect to an automated Events Feed. It picks up data from various local data feeds, such as holidays which might be connected to auto or home decor trade shows and buying events, and automatically populates the site calendar.

Plus: each event in the calendar is linked to a page on your site that is automatically generated and populated with any additional details and relevant schema. Not only does this provide more info for users, but Google and other search engines give a higher value to a large population of pages of regularly updated local content.

7. Compliance that will matter to your members

With Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 and privacy guidelines from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), credit unions have a lot of ground to cover. Making your site more accessible increases your potenital pool of members and is an inclusive and positive reflection on your credit union and brand.

The Milestone CMS is designed to create websites that are compliant with:

• Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1
• The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

And Milestone has added compliance features to accommodate upcoming privacy regulations, such as the finalized European Union’s e-Privacy Regulation or a possible federal privacy act in the U.S.

8. Prepare for a cookie less world

Data privacy is an especially important when tracking user data & behaviors as we are entering a cookie-less world. Cookie less measurement, behavioral, and conversion modelling are integrated in GA4. Multiple channels & touchpoints can influence purchase decisions, and credit unioons have so much data to analyze for micro & macro behaviors that it’s important to develop a system to reduce gaps in understanding of our data with an increased reliance on first-party data relationships.

9. Migrate and integrate with Google Analytics 4

Unlike its predecessor Universal Analytics, GA4 allows users to monitor event data for both web and app to create a detailed cross-platform customer journey that allows for a deeper understanding of customer interactions. This will provide a complete view of the customer journey and help in engaging with members across all touchpoints

10. Track ROI of your campaigns and gather business focus insights

Business-focused insights via our integrated site analytics.

Milestone CMS’s built-in analytics measure effectiveness across your website. Milestone CMS tracks down the traffic performance analytics from different sources such as direct, organic search, referral, email, and more within the Milestone Analytics dashboard, where all your brand’s online KPIs reside – website and social media performance, online revenue, digital marketing campaigns, paid campaign results, and more.

Conclusion

Generating demand for your business is very challenging but with the right set of tools and technology stack backed up with strong planning and execution you can create a competitive advantage. At Milestone, we cater specifically to the needs of location-based businesses. Our CMS platform integrated provides a unified, rich set of tools to help you manage your content and ensure your business data is accurately distributed across the entire digital world and helps you improve your digital marketing effort.

Milestone can help create a personalized digital strategy for your business. To learn more, visit us at https://www.milestoneinternet.com or call us at +1 (408) 200-2211.

Sources:

https://www.cutimes.com/
https://www.cuinsight.com/
https://www.money2020.com/
https://www.pymnts.com

Author: Gaurav Varma

Gaurav Varma is the Director of Product Marketing at Milestone Inc. He is responsible for driving brand, field, and product marketing for the Milestone suite of software products and solutions.