My Marketing Strategy
Nicolette Lemmon, President & Founder

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!