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 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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.