Marketing is Facing a Fundamental Shift. Is Your Credit Union Ready?

A recent headline speaks to a significant new marketing trend:

“Move Over CMOs, Data-Driven Growth Marketers Are Taking Over”

The article describes how the Chief Marketing Role (CMO) has been eliminated or considerably changed at several Fortune 500 companies. It argues that CMOs championing traditional practices have fallen out of step with a changing marketing landscape. A significant factor was that these CMOs failed to fully exploit the advantages of more data-driven and experiential marketing.

What is the nature of this changing marketing landscape, and what innovative methods and techniques must credit union marketers learn to leverage?

Six key areas are:

• Optimizing each step of the customer journey.
• Utilizing data-driven insights to acquire, engage, and retain customers.
• Aggressively experimenting and testing to identify the most effective marketing initiatives.
• Creating uniquely tailored messaging focused on individual customers across multiple channels.
• Delivering powerful experiences to maximize emotional connections with the brand.
• Providing “niche experiences” to deepen member ties to the organization.

Optimized Customer Journey

While the customer journey concept has existed for some time, technological improvements now allow more fine-grained measurements of the various touchpoints. Managing customer journeys typically is the responsibility of the organization’s Customer Experience (CX) process. McKinsey and Company defines CX as “… everything an organization does to deliver superior experiences, value, and growth for customers.” Encompassing both digital and offline experiences, CX covers all steps of the customer journey from before, during, and after a purchase.

Innovations in CX customer journey management include:

• Moving beyond touchpoints – expanding the vision beyond traditional touchpoints to interact and measure at more milestones in the journey.
• Automating measurement – implementing automatic data capture technology across all channels ensures more essential data becomes available for analysis.
• Predictive CX – With larger data volumes, predictive analysis of CX data may provide opportunities to proactively enhance brand value.

Deeper Insights

Organizations are now able to capture ever-increasing volumes of data from customer interactions. This provides opportunities for deeper insights to fuel customer acquisition, engagement, and retention innovations by emphasizing intimate awareness of changing consumer tastes, preferences, and motivations.

The task of accumulating enormous amounts of data has been dramatically simplified over the past decade or so. Now, the biggest challenge is storing, processing, and visualizing data so that better decisions can be made quickly and effectively. AI presents a massive opportunity in this regard in the following ways:

• AI is designed to handle large datasets. Human analysts can focus on interpretation once AI algorithms have efficiently pre-analyzed data.
• AI can analyze data in real time to support quicker responses to emerging changes in customer behavior and preferences.
• AI-powered sentiment analysis can determine the emotional tone of customer feedback to report on shifts in customer feelings about a brand.

Aggressive Experimentation

More quickly available data in bigger volumes provides the foundation for more marketing experimentation. As a result, multiple initiatives can be developed and deployed to assess overall effectiveness more readily.

For example, A/B testing with two groups possessing similar characteristics can help determine which marketing campaign is more likely to achieve corporate goals. This way, the best methods are discovered to increase sales, foster deeper engagement, and reach larger audiences more effectively.

Individualized Offerings

The advent of “big data” innovations allows today’s marketers to tailor consumer offerings down to the individual level. Highly customized messaging can now consistently follow consumers across an omnichannel marketplace. Achieving this high level of coordination places high demands on marketers to implement processes that quickly and seamlessly gather, process, and present data at the right place at the right time to maintain the consumer’s attention and increase the probability of a sale.

Experiential Marketing

Savvy marketers have proved that merely providing a great product or service does not necessarily lead to success in a competitive marketplace. Experiential marketing can increase engagement rates and turn customers into advocates by creating memorable and immersive experiences that bond customers emotionally with a brand. Among the forms experiential marketing can take are:

• Advertising campaigns that invite online feedback
• Interactive online apps
• In-person events where consumers can physically experience products or services
• Social media campaigns that stimulate online community interaction
• Pop-up stores or exhibits in high-traffic venues.

Niche Experiences

Niche experiences is a technique related to experiential marketing in which precisely defined sub-segments of a larger audience (niches) are defined by one or a combination of dimensions like:

• Culture or language
• Demographics
• Location
• Needs & Preferences
• Occupation or avocation

For credit unions, the existing member base is the larger audience from which niches are identified.

The identified niches are analyzed based on their interests, values, and beliefs to pinpoint their highest-engagement content areas. The content typically covers non-financial “lifestyle” topics, with an occasional money-related article.

This intense focus on these sub-segments gives rise to “niche experiences” where trust and engagement among these members grow deeper compared to conventional content marketing. The intended result is not only increased loyalty and advocacy for the credit union brand but also increased product sales, and wallet share.

Conclusion

Organizations increasingly demand that marketers prove their efforts contribute to corporate growth objectives. However, past marketing tools and techniques are not enough to meet this demand nor keep pace in today’s complex marketplace.

Credit union leaders must adopt the latest marketing tools and methods to optimize their chances of succeeding in the highly competitive financial services world. Along with data-intensive techniques, niche experiences can be a powerful method of achieving marketing goals. Such marketing isn’t just a side project or an expense. It needs to be a strategic priority and will directly contribute to the credit union's growth. Marketing departments and organizations as a whole need to look at this bigger picture and invest accordingly.