As you begin planning for 2011, the news continues to be disconcerting regarding a rebound.

What should you be considering for your organization?

First, a multi-layered marketing strategy that focuses on achieving corporate goals. Even if your goal is to retain what you have and replace loans that are being paid off.

There are opportunities in every marketplace, but you have to work harder to find them and capitalize on them.

How? For your members and prospective members, it is about having the right financial products for members at different life stages at the right pricing with convenient delivery systems and promoted so when they are ready to do business, they’ll turn to you.

Second, there is a need to make sure you are focusing on the lifetime value of a member through targeting different segments of the membership by age, geographic area, and product usage, to build more profitable relationships.

Third, create an ongoing marketing flywheel with layers of marketing efforts include a variety of touches where members will see the messages such as direct mail, advertising, e-marketing, branch retailing, and on the website.

Fourth, for better decision making, the marketing promotions are based on profiling using data analysis software and then tracking of results. The lynch pin is consistency across all communications for easy recognition of your brand that carves a niche in the mind of each member.

Fifth, and finally, is to make sure budget expenditures are aligned with the marketing efforts that support achieving the corporate goals. As results are tracked in terms of members, loan and deposit accounts, and dollar balances, the senior team can review the progress toward the goals and determine a return on investment.

The marketing planning process continues during the year to account for economic changes, consumer changes, and introduction of new products or services.

In reading an article that interviewed Al Ries and daughter, Laura Ries on their books on branding and marketing, I was struck by one analogy. It was this:

“The function of advertising is to protect the brand from its potential competitors. It’s like life insurance. What’s the return on investment if you don’t die? Zero. But that doesn’t mean that a life insurance policy is not a good thing to buy. It protects your heirs from an untimely death.”

Time and again, I have found it difficult to answer the senior management team member who asks what specifically they will get from doing media advertising. The answer is usually, a rise in traffic, new members joining, more business being opened. However, the formula does not exist to calculate a return on investment for that CEO or CFO.

In these extraordinary times, when marketing dollars have been squeezed and decisions are made down to the dollar on many campaigns, advertising looks like a luxury. Yet, according to Ries and Ries, a company still needs “life insurance!”

In marketing budgets for clients, we still recommend for community charter credit unions, having up to 25% used for advertising including print, cable, radio and billboard. In the more flourishing times, some community charter credit unions used even higher percentages to expand their visibility across their markets served.

Today, carving out some “brand insurance” is still important to stay in the mind of your members because if you drop all your efforts to stay in front of them, out of sight, out of mind is a brand killer!

A client asked about an industry average for the penetration of email addresses across credit unions, to compare her institution’s percentage. This statistic sparked an interest for me about how those percentages are faring in a down economy. The main aspect that intrigued me was the interest in so many senior management teams of using email, mobile texts, and social media as the ability to reach members more cheaply.

Just reviewing the percentages of ten credit union clients scattered throughout the country, the results showed an average of 34% penetration of email addresses in their memberships. The actual percentages ranged from 17% for a credit union with 60,000 plus members, to a remarkable 57% for a credit union with a little more than 21,000 members.

In current times, budgets are lean and are still being trimmed left and right. While e-marketing is a more frugal option, from the average that was just discussed, it’s only hitting about one-third of members. While more traditional marketing touches such as direct mail is more expensive, if only considering using e-marketing, a significant percentage of members are missed.

The solution is a targeted mix of direct mail and email with other “touches” included such as a Facebook page, online marketing in home banking, and in-branch retailing. The key is that the emphasis in most credit unions has not been to collect e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers for marketing. And, not every member has computer access or wants to have more marketing in their inbox.

Are you being aggressive about collecting e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers?

Two pieces of news were disappointing about the economy last week. So what’s new?

From MoneyNews.com, the word from the Fed is the recovery will take at least 5 or even six years. When your business depends on lending, that’s enough to send shudders down the spine!

Then, a client says their approval ratio of loan applications is 2:1, for every two applications, there is one that gets funded. As a marketer, our part in the lending equation is lead generation, so when I asked about the approval percentage in the client meeting, I was truly expecting maybe 60% approved!

From our free Marketing Tips newsletter that we sent out recently, I had found this statistic from the 24/7 Wall Street blog, “Figures provided by FICO Inc. show that 25.5 percent of consumers — nearly 43.4 million people — now have a credit score of 599 or below, marking them as poor risks for lenders.” This is almost triple the 15 percent that used to fall below 599, according to data posted on Myfico.com.

When you consider that the marketing needs to uncover twice as many leads in a down market, from a group with deteriorating credit scores, it is a bit daunting.

What to do? Raise some eyebrows! In essence, if the ideas you propose raise the eyebrows of your team when you talk about it, then it has the opportunity to generate interest and fun! Consider these ideas:

• Make new friends, but keep the old – one is silver, the other gold! You have to keep in touch with members as well as advertise for new ones. Remind your market area that your credit union is still lending. Members will not come right to you with their loan needs if you haven’t kept in touch with them.
• Be bold and brave to become the only one in town who everyone’s talking about with the good deals. You have to cut through the clutter with great auto loan offers and refinancing incentives. Don’t wimp out by falling back on what the competition is doing – decide to be the biggest competitor to scare the other guys!
• Be creative to motivate the entire staff to help steal loans. Use fun incentives that do not need to be money, like pizza parties, movie theater tickets, and gift cards. One client uses a tub of goodies as a reward for any branch that achieves their loan goal for the month. Even chances for a vacation trip or a plane ticket for individual who are capturing those outside debts of members. And, an appreciated reward is always having the chance for a half or full days off.

So, let’s get out there and raise some eyebrows!

During these “extraordinary” times, it is easy to lose sight of the marketing strategy that you planned for 2010 back at the end of 2009. When the first quarter did not see a recovery by consumers, many management teams became concerned, cutting budgets even deeper.

The pressure of the down economy and weak loan demand, has lead to budget cuts which limit the ability of marketing to keep consistent lead generation running. And, knee-jerk requests from senior management to do short-term pushes creates a frenetic marketing department.

The solution to many marketers is to give in, sell out their strategic marketing plan and simply sigh, “fine, what is the offer and the rate you want to promote?”

Unfortunately, this leads to the very inconsistency that the strategic marketing plan is to eliminate! Consider these points:

• There is no magic bullet, but there is an ongoing need to be in front of your target markets to remind them to turn to your credit union when they are ready.
• The marketing you did last year set the foundation for today and what you’re doing today is setting the stage for capturing business next year. So, if it is too disjointed, or reactionary, it will impact future success because the foundation will not be consistent.
• The ability to track and review to past promotions will be lost with a lot of divergence from the established plan, so advise senior management that they need to stay with the plan if they want to best track results.
• If senior management continues to pressure for budget cuts yet has requests for promotions outside the plan, it’s important to remind them that disjointed promotions leave the same kind of impression on members. Disjointed marketing undermines the consistent brand message and confuses the value of doing business with the credit union.

Keep the faith in the marketing strategy that you had planned, thoughtfully determined based on solid decision making from tracking and research! Try not to sell out and watch for the shoulder shrug that indicates you are submitting against your better judgment!

Continuing our discussion on Credit Union Sustainability here is another marketing consultant’s perspective – from “the numbers” side! Dennis Koepke, Vice President and MCIF Guru of LemmonTree Marketing Group, discusses opportunities credit unions have in utilizing their member data and MCIF system. One trend Koepke currently sees with clients is that they are growing organically (more members are being added to current households as opposed to an increasing number of new households.) To yield better results, he recommends further segmenting of membership. By utilizing key data, such as credit scores can prove to be valuable when determining a target market for a loan promotion. Koepke also stresses the importance of analyzing retention rates and to some degree comparing them to the past.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_jblsaCrlM

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