My Marketing Trends Kelly Kressner, Marketing Specialist

Are you in the dark about how your customers feel about your financial institution? Do you know how they view your customer service? With millions of consumers adopting blogging and social media networking sites to express their financial needs and concerns in an open forum, looking online to see what your customers may already be saying about you is a great place to start.

An incredibly helpful tool for this discovery process is Google Alerts. Google Alerts enable you to check and see what people may be saying about your financial institution or products on a website, blog or a comment on a blog. Keeping track of this will help you protect your brand.

You can sign up for Google Alerts using your financial institution’s name and any of your program or promotional product names. Then, when Google spiders are scanning, if your selected names/words are mentioned on a site, you will receive an alert via email. We’ve been experimenting with these and have found ourselves popping up in more places than we expected!



Knowing if there are complaints about your service, you can look into it and maybe address it in the same blog or with a post on your own site. If there are testimonials of how great your financial institution treats customers, set up links from your site to them. You may also find that there is a particular product or service that your customers wish you had, the opportunities are endless!

Has your financial institution used Google Alerts to gain valued customer insights? Share your story with us!

Clueless about how social media fits into your overall marketing strategy? Register for our FREE webinar, Let’s Talk Strategy – Layering Social Media with Traditional Marketing. Tune in on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 (8:30 a.m. PST, 11:30 a.m. EST) to hear from the faculty of the Credit Union Marketing University key tips on how to weave social media into your marketing efforts to stretch your 2009 budget. To register, click here.