It might sound easy, but engaging your members can be very difficult. In today’s world of text messages, emails, phone calls, direct mail, billboards, radio ads, app notifications, social media posts, and so much more, people are getting bombarded with marketing communications.

No marketing plan or campaign is foolproof, and without the proper planning and execution, it is easy to justify why a promotion or campaign was unsuccessful. However, with the proper attention given to preparation and follow-through, the probability of success increases tremendously.

Five tips and tricks

Arguably the most important element of a campaign comes right at the beginning: the good idea. The premise for which you are promoting a product or service is the key to whether the marketing is going to work. Understanding your product and your goal needs to come first and foremost before taking further action.

A good idea is the foundational building blocks on which your whole campaign is built, and if you don’t start with a solid foundation, the whole campaign will likely crumble.

Engaging your members comes in many different forms and the medium through which you are trying to reach them has many factors, but regardless it’s important to do it well. I’ve defined five areas that I believe are the cornerstones of creating a winning strategy when developing a marketing promotion across all channels and mediums.

Attention grabber

First, grab your audience’s attention. It’s important to say or write the right things. Crafting a message your members will understand quickly and clearly is crucial to succeeding. Along with saying the right thing, your promotion should look the part, as well.

Design can be subjective, however professional and high-quality graphic design has proven time and time again to be successful. Making your marketing aesthetically pleasing to look at will undoubtedly catch your audience’s eye more quickly.

Trust

Second, build trust with your members and potential members. Engaging your audience with content related to member-owners, local connections, and community involvement helps to ensure that your message is received as trustworthy.

Connecting with community and communicating with your audience that your owners and members are in the local community and your credit union is tied together with them is highly important. Often times credit unions have long-standing ties with their local community that can also help convey the message that you are trustworthy and committed to your membership for the long haul.

Sell your products

Third, tell your membership about your products and services. This doesn’t mean that every bit of fine print needs to be spelled out on your website or marketing collateral, but it does mean you need to avoid being vague. Saying your credit union has great savings rates is not likely to move your audience to take action.

However, telling your audience about your specific seasonal rates for savings or certificates of deposit has a much higher probability of having action taken. Additionally, providing your audience with additional benefits of your products and services along with highlighting features or levels of service simply increases the likelihood that your audience will be engaged.

Be creative

Fourth, make your marketing fun. Engagement increases when campaigns prompt fun involvement from the audience. Running a contest that engages your membership in a fun way or prompting for social media involvement are two simple suggestions that can communicate to your audience that your credit union is interesting, involved, and enjoyable to participate with.

Adding elements of fun engagement in your branches is another great suggestion for helping to make the experience of engaging with your credit union more pleasant and fun.

Be authentic and direct

The fifth and final suggestion for engaging your membership is to ensure that whatever you are communicating to your membership is real. If you’re too vague or your messaging seems disingenuous your audience will sniff it out immediately, and that can be really harmful to your engagement.

Make extra effort to evaluate your marketing and commit to not getting in the way of the real information your audience needs.  This ties in with the second point of being trustworthy, but you will have deeper and stronger engagement with your members and potential members if they feel that you have given them good and solid information.

Success takes time

Incorporating these five elements into your marketing campaigns will lead to more successful audience engagement. It’s important to remember to stay consistent with these ideas and that marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

If you run the long race and continuously stay authentic, remember not to water down your messages, make it fun, and keep it real, your marketing will lead your credit union and your members to success!