How can you turn your snazzy new marketing hub into a powerhouse of growth and engagement?

If you've recently updated your website or are considering an update, consider these six pillars to go from updating your website to building a platform for growth. 

Establish an Acquisition Strategy

Credit unions by nature aren't very good at selling. Sorry. But the reality is that often the non-profit part of the credit union mission impedes our ability or even desire to grow.

But isn't it also our job to make sure as many people as possible know about us, learn about what we offer and how we're different from banks?

In this reality, acquisition has to be part of the story and that means fishing where the fish are.

Focus on intent and qualified traffic by leveraging search and social media advertising to drive bottom of the funnel traffic while data-driven display advertising powers the top.

Leverage Content Marketing for SEO

About 1 in 3 people searching will actually click on an ad. So with an acquisition strategy in place, we've got 1/3 of our opportunity taken care of. What about the rest of it?

That's where SEO comes in. I'm talking about the white hat, Olivia Pope, good guy kind of SEO. None of this keyword cramming, weird linking, promises of page one results overnight junk.

The kind that matters to search engines and your members comes in the form of creating value, answering questions and being an expert resource. That only comes from turning into a content publisher.

If your website rebuild doesn't have a content resource center where you're dedicated to financial education, you missed the boat.

This content drives up your search ranking for long tail keywords while also helping your brand establish relationships well ahead of the actual financial need.

A member or prospective member may engage with a piece of content 30 – 45 days ahead of actually needing to complete a loan application.

Because of that content your brand will be top of mind when they actually need the service. They return again to their computer, enter in a search query and up pops your ad.

Click, click, and clack. Application submitted.

Actually Implement Analytics

Simply installing an analytics package on your website doesn't mean much. When you're in the process of wire framing your new website, run a concurrent project to document your success events. Success events are the high value things you want people to do on your website. 

• Visit membership information pages
• Submit a membership form
• Account information pages
• Submit an account application

Setting these pages and actions up as events and goals inside your analytics package will help you better track performance of your website and your overall marketing activities. Plus it will help you start to build audiences for our next point. Remarketing.

Enable Remarketing and Build Audiences

Remember last Christmas when all the holiday gifts you were shopping for on Amazon seemed to oddly follow you around the Internet for weeks? That's remarketing.

A website visitor visits a success events page, say "learn more about being a member." However they don't complete the application. Ad servers use anonymous user data collected via pixels to then serve a display ad to the user, for example: "Complete your member application and start receiving the benefits of being a credit union member today!"

When a user is served a remarketing ad, we see a 70% likelihood to convert, still many credit union websites I visit aren't equipped with remarketing tags.  

Landing Pages

So maybe you are using acquisition tactics, remarketing and this fancy stuff. Are you leveraging unique landing pages?

Not all web pages are created equal, and marketing pages are at the top of the list.

If your website project doesn't include the ability to quickly and dynamically launch landing pages to support marketing efforts, add this to your project now.

Landing pages are the unsung heroes of a marketing conversion funnel. Too often marketers just dump marketing traffic all into the same place, maybe your home page or an about us page.

The problem is that there is way too much going on on these pages and the experience is irrelevant to the expectation of the user you're delivering.

The result, poor performance.

Consider an ad for an auto loan. The ad click through drops the user onto a page with a dozen links and opportunities to do anything other than get more information or submit an application. How well do you think that marketing spend is going to perform in delivering auto loan opportunities to your credit union?

Test and Optimize User Experiences

The single greatest thing you can do with your website update project is implement conversion rate optimization. Fine tuning the website experience for the different personas using your website will increase member satisfaction and overall membership, deposit and loan growth.

There are affordable tools that take the science and data complexity out of the statistical calculations to help you fine tune where to put your call to actions, what they should be and so on. If you don't take anything else from this list to heart, consider this one item. With only an investment in the technology and the time to plan tests you can make your existing members happier by fine tuning their website experience and you can grow your credit union by fine tuning your conversion funnel. It's a win-win.

Your credit union is the platform for your digital marketing strategy. It's the front door of your credit union to a world that's connected 24/7. Make sure you give it more than a fresh coat of paint when you undertake a website update project. Give it a jetpack to achieve your growth and engagement goals.

Ryan Ruud is the founder and CEO of Credit Union Consulting Group and Lake One Digital. He can be reached at 612-799-0803 or [email protected].