It's a simple premise. The better your credit union is at marketing, the more successful it will be. Yet many credit unions continue to make the same mistakes over and over. Here are three common mistakes to avoid.

Don't Abuse Your Brand

When most people hear the word brand, they think of a logo. Even the American Marketing Association defines brand as “a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.”

Your brand is so much more than your logo, though. Your brand is really the sum total of what the public – members and non-members alike – thinks about your credit union, contrasted against what you want the public to think about your credit union. In one sense, the delta between those two represents your marketing opportunity.

If you don't understand your brand, you can't grow and nurture your brand. You must clearly define your brand identity and then engage only in marketing activities that support and further your brand. In fact, that should be your first consideration when evaluating a new marketing approach: Does it support my brand? If the answer is no, there's no need for further consideration.

Don't Put the Wrong People in Charge

Marketing is the department that some executives seem to think requires no real qualifications. You wouldn't promote a teller to, for example, CFO. Marketing is every bit as critical to your credit union's success as sound financial management, so why would you put a teller in charge of marketing?

Once you realize that's there's much more to marketing that creating pretty brochures or posting pictures to the credit union's Facebook page, it becomes obvious. Even the smallest credit union needs and deserves a qualified marketing person – someone who got into marketing as a planned career choice, not just someone who was tired of working the drive-up window.

Don't Confuse Marketing, Sales and Business Development

These are three different disciplines that require three different types of expertise and, perhaps most importantly, three different types of managers. If your credit union is going to actively engage in all three of these activities, you need a separate, skilled and experienced manager for each one. It's tempting to find someone who can do double or even triple duty, but the quality in all three areas will suffer.

This is especially true of business development. Your business development officers are essentially the ambassadors of your brand. And as mentioned earlier, anything that doesn't properly support your brand needs to be eliminated.

It's important, too, not to think of marketing as a subfunction of sales. Although closely intertwined, the two are very different. The goal of the salesperson is to sell something today. The goal of the marketer is to create an environment where someone is more likely to buy something tomorrow.

Keep in mind that just as good marketing can help you, bad marketing can actually hurt you. Avoid these mistakes and you'll be on your way to a more successful credit union.