Why Lifestyle Content is the New Frontier for Credit Union Success

Innovative credit unions are always looking for effective ways to promote their products and services in the marketplace. One such trend is content marketing. As noted in a previous post, "Beyond Features: How Lifestyle Marketing Enhances Product Marketing", this approach has advantages over traditional product marketing. However, content marketing’s effectiveness for credit unions can be constrained by its limitation to financial topics. This potentially can lead to fewer website visits and reduced duration in the time visitors spend using the credit union’s online resources.

Niche marketing with targeted lifestyle content offers a superior means to boost member trust and engagement, thereby increasing the number of visits and time spent on the site.

Content Marketing – A Review

Content marketing focuses on providing exciting and valuable information for a defined audience. This technique aims to build trust and engagement to motivate profitable audience activity.

The point of content marketing is not to push the features and benefits of a product or service. Instead, the subject matter of the content expresses a broader scope, communicating mostly non-product information. The intended effect is for the resulting deeper engagement to build trust, thereby making the audience more likely to purchase products or services via the content provider.

Content marketing pundits typically suggest providing information geared toward the provider's industry. For credit unions, this means financial topics. However, such a narrow scope of content can limit the number of visits and duration of the visits by the target audience.

Why the Number and Duration of Visits Matters

Since e-commerce became a mass-market phenomenon in the mid-1990s, marketers have developed numerous metrics to determine the success of their online business efforts. Two metrics that quickly became benchmark measurements were website visits and visit duration.

Website visits or “traffic” measure how many people view the content, and, of course, “more” is better. However, to measure visitor engagement, visit duration is the metric to watch. This is the amount of time visitors spend looking at the content. The more time spent, the greater the engagement. Put another way, the longer an audience member is engaged with the content, the more excellent the opportunity for trust to grow. This leads to ever-deepening engagement, resulting in economic benefits for the content provider.

Financial Content Only = Fewer Visitors and Lower Engagement

Credit unions are financial experts, so it seems to make sense that they should “stick to the knitting” and offer only financial content. Ironically, this may work against the goal of increasing visits and promoting visit duration and engagement.

The problem is the nature of financial information. It suffers from three disadvantages in the drive to attract visitors and keep them tuned in longer.

1. First, financial information ranks far down the list in popularity relative to other topics. The website-building platform Wix conducted a study of blogging websites and listed the top twenty most popular subjects. “Personal finance” landed in the bottom half of the pack.
   
   
   1. Food
   2. Travel
   3. Health and fitness
   4. Lifestyle
   5. Fashion and beauty
   6. Photography
   7. Personal
   8. DIY crafts
   9. Parenting
   10. Music
   11. Business
   12. Art and design
   13. Books and writing
   14. Personal finance
   15. Interior design
   16. Sports
   17. News
   18. Movies
   19. Religion
   20. Politics
2. Second, the need to find specific financial information comes up only occasionally for most people. For example, a consumer may search for car loan information once every five years. This suggests that financial information generates less traffic (visits) than other subjects. 
3. Finally, when a consumer looks for financial information, the typical motivation is to “learn and leave.’ This means that upon finding the needed information, the visitor leaves the site rather than hanging around to browse other content. This results in a low visit duration score, translating to only brief engagement.

Niche Marketing/Lifestyle Content – What is It?

Credit unions have a robust alternative to single-subject financial content marketing: niche marketing with targeted lifestyle content.

Niche marketing is a refined form of content marketing in which carefully 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 on their interests, values, and beliefs to laser-focus on their highest engagement content areas. While some financial information may be strategically sprinkled in, the vast majority is carefully curated “lifestyle” content as characterized by the top ten popular subject areas noted above in the Wix study.

This intense focus on these sub-segments drives “niche experiences” where trust and engagement among niche members grow deeper compared to conventional content marketing.

This has two benefits:

1. First, the credit union member goodwill is boosted by the value-added service of rich educational and entertaining content.
2. Second, the positive member experience and engagement resulting from the first benefit ultimately helps credit unions sell more products and increases the number of products sold per member (“wallet share.”) This happens by “selling without selling,” the process of getting in front of members with stimulating lifestyle content that inspires them to feel more open to strategically placed call-to-actions pointing to the credit union’s financial products.

Content marketing has revolutionized online marketing, but credit unions can do better. A small “slice-of-the-pie” syndrome hampers one-subject financial websites. They only address a narrow sliver of what members consider to be their overall interest areas.

Niche marketing with targeted lifestyle content approaches carefully selected member subsets with a broad array of content specifically tailored to the wider scope of their interests. In many respects, the information touches more aspects of their daily lives, motivating them to visit the credit union’s online resources more often and stay longer, thereby leashing the true potential of content marketing.